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Top 10 Hurdles to Innovation

The Innovation Identity Series Like people, every company has its own personality. The Innovation Identity

series uncovers what drives organizations and how decisions are made,

enabling innovation teams to craft processes and outcomes that the

company can embrace and make real.

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 Innovation isn’t easy. Creating an idea that serves both

the needs of consumers and the business is challenging,

and tension is an inevitable part of the process. However,

some amount of tension is perfectly natural—and critical—

because it provides focus and a framework for success. But

managing tension incorrectly can create barriers—or

hurdles—to success. Here are the top ten hurdles to

innovation, from project kickoff to market testing, which

can cause an innovation project to fail:

1. Failing to Align on Expectations. The term “innovation” may be one of the most

overused in all of business. Companies crave it so much they are willing to assign the

term to almost anything they create, putting it in danger of “becoming a cliché, if it

isn’t one already,” says Wall Street Journal reporter Leslie Kwoh, who regularly

reports on the topic. Because it’s so overused, it’s come to mean anything from

incremental (quick to market) to disruptive (requiring significant internal change).

As a result, you must specifically define your innovation ambition at the outset of a

project, aligning on issues such as growth goals and how much disruption the

organization is willing to adopt (for more information on better understanding your

innovation ambition, click here). If a clear definition of your innovation ambition is

not agreed upon, you will almost certainly find tension over whether the final idea is

“right” for what the organization needs.

2. Expecting Overly Ambitious Launch Results. Many companies define their

innovation ambition by providing a volume goal. Now, volume goals create a

measurable target, which is good. But the people setting the goals often reach too

high too quickly, neglecting to take the adoption curve into account. Goals of large

volume require a more disruptive innovation, which typically takes longer for

consumers to adopt. When volume goals are set too closely to the launch of the

product, the team feels the pressure of creating a huge hit with immediate impact.

As a result, some potentially fantastic ideas get eliminated. When I worked in the

footwear industry, the CEO felt that all new products should sell a million pairs of

shoes at launch and regularly used the model of a major competitor as a benchmark.

When initial designs were shared, many innovative designs were scrapped because

they would fall short of the million pair volume goal in its first year. Months later, we

were able to obtain the historical sales data on the competitive shoe the CEO used

as an example and learned that it took almost five years before this shoe sold a

million pairs a year. In fact, it only sold 3,000 pairs in its first year! Failing to

By Altitude

Strategy

Director

Craig McCarthy

   

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recognize the natural adoption of new products meant that many new designs that

had million pair potential were never made.

3. Unclear Ownership. Bringing new ideas to life typically requires the organization to

operate in new ways, cutting across normal structures. Unless the project has clearly

designated ownership, project momentum can stall as the ownership structure is

negotiated. Recently, I finished a project that fell nearly six months behind schedule.

Nearly all of the delays occurred when a decision needed to be made that involved

more than the key stakeholder, as the other sides of the organization weighed in and

negotiated a compromise. If a single entity was clearly responsible for the project,

these delays could have been avoided.

4. Letting the Present Get in the Way of the Future. When an innovation project is

initiated as a response to a successful new product launch from a competitor, it

becomes tempting to define success as doing the same thing better than a

competitive launch, which leaves many great ideas on the cutting room floor. For

example, the launch of Nike+iPod in 2006 left Adidas flat-footed. As a response, the

Adidas CEO demanded a better version of what Nike had created. The result was

MiCoach—a positively reviewed running tool that very few people ever used. Adidas

focused exclusively on creating a better Nike+ and failed to consider new

opportunities. Since Nike+ was already doing a good job for people, consumers had

little incentive to switch.

5. Looking for the Lightening Bolt. Project members often enter the consumer

research phase with the expectation that a great idea will come up simply by asking

people what they need. If it were that simple, there would be many more successful

product launches each year. Yet tension tends to grow when there is no clear

answer immediately following the research. Most consumers can’t imagine beyond

their current state. If you ask them what they want, they reply that they want a

better version of what they have today. Seeing new opportunities doesn’t come

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directly from the mouths of consumers, but rather from designers thinking deeply

about what they’re doing and why they are doing it.

6. Analysis Paralysis. Coming out of consumer research, the team is faced with a

seemingly huge amount of loosely related data. Knowing how and where to start

can be intimidating, and it’s tempting to throw up your hands. Yet the opportunity is

in there. The key is to dive in with a process. At Altitude, we dig into the information

by simply telling the stories of the people we’ve met, observed, and interviewed. As

we move through the personal stories, we make connections and see patterns

emerge among the individuals. This work helps us tell the story of the group and

becomes the foundation of the strategy and the starting point for ideas.

7. Trying to Eliminate Ambiguity. In the business world, not knowing the answer is

perceived as a weakness, and as a result, ambiguity is highly avoided and decisive

action is valued. However, innovation is powered by ambiguity. New and powerful

ideas come from thinking differently, and ambiguity allows you to question

assumptions and think about problems from different perspectives. Perhaps the

biggest hurdle to innovation is embracing the power of ambiguity for innovation in

an environment that constantly seeks to eliminate it.

8. Expecting Linear Progression. In many projects, 50 percent of the progress is

made in the last ten percent of the timeline. However, clients expect a direct

correlation between time and progress. Graphing the two lines of progression looks

like this:

The gap between the two lines causes tension as clients feel that the project is

behind schedule and, thus, in risk of failure. At Altitude, we begin nearly every

project by showing the diagram above to set expectations. Throughout the project,

we revisit it at all major milestone meetings. It helps communicate the arc of

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innovation and allows us to develop trust with the client, so when we are in the

ambiguous state, we can continue to work collaboratively and make progress.

9. Watering Down the Idea. When a new idea starts to become more tangible, its

impact on the organization becomes increasingly clear. It’s tempting to make

compromises so that it fits more easily into how the organization works. The risk

becomes in making the wrong compromises or so many compromises that it waters

down the idea and makes it less valuable to consumers. Successful innovation means

holding true to your original innovation ambition. It can be very easy to do what’s

easy for the organization rather than what’s right for the idea. Many times, this can

be the difference between success and failure in the market.

10. Testing to Win. Many client innovation processes are stage gate—the innovation

pass-the-test to move forward to the next stage or die. However, design thinking-

based innovation is a process of constant iteration—continually learning what works

and what doesn’t to create a design that will work successfully. Tests in this context

are based in learning. The friction occurs when the two mindsets are placed in the

same innovation project. People used to the stage gate process look at unpopular

designs and see failure and wasted effort, while those used to design thinking see it

as information to create the next set of designs. On a recent project, when we tested

three prototypes, no single design was the clear winner. However, a clear pattern

emerged as to what was driving consumer reaction—something on which we could

base a new round of designs. Meanwhile, the clients were disheartened. Despite our

best efforts to explain the good news, they viewed the project as a failure. That is,

until we showed them the design based on the learning from the product test. They

looked at the test as an end point, while we looked at is as a new starting point.

Bringing an idea from concept to commerce requires setting the proper

expectations and having the tough conversations during moments of tension to

keep everyone focused on the ultimate goal of clearing those hurdles to innovation—

and creating a successful launch that results in growth.