Products are not successful, it is the people behind the scenes that make these products successful. Hence the efforts of innovators is a better indicator of where the product is going than the product itself. Thirty years of research has not made us better in predicting innovation success. To be more innovative, we need more people engaged in innovation, and be more stringent in the efforts they put in to validate their ideas.
It is bad that 1 out of 10 innovation fail, but for another reason than you may think; The number of innovations that fail is too low. You need many more innovations to ensure success in the market place. We are focusing on the wrong metric. The metric used here is the number of projects that enter the innovation pipeline versus those that make to the marketplace and succeed. Over the years, the “best” companies have become very effective in trimming down the number of project in the early stages. However, what remains very difficult to predict is which projects to keep and which to discard. The chances of throwing away the child with the bathwater are significant.
25% Of ideas your employees voice are never listen too. While on the contrary, you will likely be willing to listen to any expensive outside experts, who will kindly tell you what your employees already knew. By the way, the more you pay, the more likely you will listen. The Washington Blog post: “The troubling flaws in how we select experts”, gives interesting insights in why we don’t listen to our own people, but are willing to follow the advice of (less qualified) experts. Unfortunately, this article does not provide a solution to the problem. In this blog we explain where to start to address this issue.
To be successful innovator you need a structured approach. This blog gives you 5 reasons why: five reasons why a structured approach is essential to innovation: (1) The weakest link determines performance (2) Innovation is not urgent today, but important for tomorrow (3) Incentives and rewards: Innovation is teamwork and not always successful (4) Improve your process (5) Want to be the best?
The margins of many professional service firms are under pressure, because of technology, internet, globalization, or changing customer expectations. Cost cutting is one way out, but only gets you sofar. This webinar shows how innovation can bring prosperity to professional service organizations, similar to what it has done for many facturing firms. However, to be successful, requires an alternative approach to innovation.