5 Stupid Things Companies Do to Mess Up Their Innovation | Executive Street

Even after 20 years as an Innovation Management Consultant, I continue to be amazed at the failure rate of innovation. In fact, some studies suggest that as much as 80 percent of new product introductions fail. Maybe even more shocking is the fact that less than two percent of the 3,000 patents that are issued each week will ever reach market success. What’s interesting about all this is that most of the mistakes that cause these failures come from five basic screw-ups. The result is wasted time, wasted money, and, in some cases, wasted brand equity. So, what are these five mistakes?

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Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work : The New Yorker

ANNALS OF IDEAS about brainstorming and creativity. In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner of the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared all of his creative secrets. “Your Creative Power” was filled with a variety of tricks and strategies, but Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm.” The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The single most important of these, Osborn said, was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became a popular business guru. The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution.

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The Rise of the New Groupthink and the Fallacy about Collaboration - NYTimes.com

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. And y Rementer But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

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Listen to What Innovators Don't Talk About - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

While working away on my laptop at a hotel breakfast, I couldn't help but overhear the four gentlemen poring over an iPad two tables way. Their intense discussion revolved around rolling out their high-tech prototypes in a medical care complex. Since I've written about prototypes and prototyping, I couldn't help but eavesdrop. Forgive me. The foursome represented a mix of medical care complex personnel and what was clearly an entrepreneurial innovator with a potentially high-impact idea. I'll skip the technical details, but this was clearly a sophisticated group who were both smart and ambitious. The prototypes were their gateways to success. Their debates included whether it made more sense to

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Innovation in Europe completely lacks 'creative destruction': Report | EurActiv

European innovation policies lack the "creative destruction" widely accepted in the US, raising barriers for businesses seeking to find new ideas and applications, according to a report compiled by the Centre for European Reform, a British think-tank. In the report, entitled 'Innovation: How Europe can take off', a series of academics give their opinions on Europe's approach to innovation policy and how it can be improved. The report's authors all broadly agree that innovation is not the same as research and development. Increasingly, it has also become a democratic process with consumers which is likely to contribute ideas as much as entrepreneurs and scientists.

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