How to create a culture of criticism to facilitate innovation?, ETHRWorld

By Damodar Enduri

In order to improve their revenues and margins, organizations must keep innovating their products, offerings or business model. This is because there is one cost/expense item that will inevitably keep increasing for all organizations over a period of time – the salary bill.

However, it is not easy to keep innovating your products or offerings. An analysis of the innovations conceptualized by organizations across industries will reveal that there are more failed projects than successful ones. The Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, once famously estimated that 95% of new products fail. Others have put the innovation failure rate of new products at around 70% to 80%. Similarly, more than 70% of organization-wide process innovation or transformation projects fail.

Reasons why Innovation Projects Fail

Key factors that contribute to the failure of innovation projects

1. unwillingness of an organization to weed out bad ideas
2. ideas are not fully developed before implementation

A key factor that contributes to the failure of innovation projects is the unwillingness of an organization to weed out bad ideas at a preliminary phase itself. Another reason for failure is that ideas are not fully developed (or allowed to be developed) before they are taken to the implementation phase. This, naturally, leads us to the question – what prevents an…