Innovation is a key component of any enterprise, but failure is an intrinsic, inevitable part of the process. Most products fail, most mergers and acquisitions fail, most projects fail and most startup ventures fail. All the innovation, entrepreneurial drive and creativity won’t keep your company afloat if it lacks a structure and operating blueprint that can guide its ongoing success and conquer all changes and challenges. The laundry list of companies failing despite innovative, new business models seems almost limitless:
1.Not having a formal innovation management framework and systems
2.Not tying initiatives to overall company strategy
3.Not allocating cross-disciplinary resources
4.Not getting buy-in and ownership from cross-functional teams
5.Not creating intelligence driven options and scenarios
6.Not deploying measurement criteria and metrics
In his classic book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker describes innovation as a delicate dance between perception and analysis. Analysis, with all its discipline, must be based on a perception of change: “This requires a willingness to say, I don’t actually know enough to analyze, but I shall find out. I’ll go out, look around, ask questions, and listen.’”
In an age of unanswerable questions, asking the right question might just be the answer.
Faisal Hoque is founder, chairman, and CEO at BTM Corporation and founder of research think-tank BTM Institute. His newest book is The Power of Convergence. © 2012 Faisal Hoque. Follow him on Twitter @faisal_hoque.
[Image: Flickr user Jennuine Captures]
Innovation products fail because there’s too much focus on technology
The first reason why innovation products is that there’s often too much focus on technology and not enough on understanding consumers. Recently, I was part of a jury at Centrale Paris, a leading engineering school in France, and I was asked