INSIGHTS

By Frances Cairns and Chris Shipley Too often—perhaps most often—business leaders think of innovation as a side hustle. It’s a project. A skunkworks. An initiative. An entrepreneurial venture. At best, a strategy. No doubt that approach has worked for some companies, allowing them to cordon off higher-risk initiatives from their core business. This bet-hedging strategy seems sensible, but it, too, is fraught with risk when scarce resources must be allocated, new businesses in

Not long ago, we partnered with a mature, $2 billion private equity-backed company that had moved beyond its prime and was slipping into the “Fall” phase of the Ichak Adizes Organizational Lifecycle. Faced with mounting pressure from investors to deliver the next breakthrough product and sustain growth, the company found itself at a crossroads. The leadership team—charged with both growth and maintaining core operations—was reluctant to explore new ventures that could disrupt

It goes without saying - yet here we are saying it - that product innovation relies heavily on technology for its success. Yet perhaps surprisingly, technology often proves to be the greatest barrier to innovation. In fact, tech teams are most often left holding the bag when innovation projects fail, in part because technology infrastructure remains a virtual black box for much of the rest of the organization. It’s easy to blame something you don’t understand for a product in

A significant barrier to innovation is C-Suite bias—the tendency of top executives to exert outsized influence on the direction of projects, often without a deep understanding of innovation management, product development, technology, or emerging market dynamics.  This influence exerts a sort of executive pull. The personal preferences and product ideas of leaders disproportionately shape innovation priorities, even when these initiatives lack market validation. While these p

Focusing on short-term wins encourages incremental improvements over transformative innovation, reinforcing the status quo and stifling bold ideas that could drive future growth.

Like driving through a sudden whiteout, organizations move forward confident they have what they need to innovate — until visibility disappears. By the time failure is obvious, it’s already too late. The challenge isn’t effort. It’s insight.

The Obvious Saboteurs of Your Innovation Initiatives The conference room was thick with disappointment. For six months, this talented development team had designed, debated, and developed a next-generation platform that was to be a bridge between a universe of entrepreneurial partners and customers and the Fortune 50 company that had contracted the agency to build it. But now, just a week into the new quarter, the client pulled the plug on the project. What went wrong? That’s

Across America and around the world, a Kabuki theater of a sort is playing out in corporations large and small, established and new. It’s called innovation. Startup guru  Steve Blank  first described this “innovation theater”, as he called it, as the flurry of activities that allow organizations to believe they are making great progress but that, in reality, rarely deliver new value.1 It has become fashionable for companies to host hackathons where entrepreneurially-minded co

More than $215 billion is lost to innovation projects annually.1 In 2023, failed startups erased $27 billion from venture capital balance sheets.2  Mergers and acquisitions fail way more often than they succeed, 3 evaporating billions in value each year. Despite the vast amounts invested - more than half a trillion a year- strategies meant to drive innovation often collapse under their own weight. No one intends for innovation strategies to derail, and yet they do. With alarm