5 systemic reasons why your Innovation processes are not successful:

1. Innovation within existing category boundaries: Companies with a category focus can have a blind-spots outside the defined category context. As a result, innovations are mainly incremental and focused around product benefit enhancements. Remember: Consumers and customers don’t care about category definitions. They seek better solutions. Companies that are category blind will be disrupted by competitors who integrate vertically and horizontally to develop new business models.
2. Defining the wrong strategy and following it blindly: This issue is directly related to the first. I don’t know if you remember Nokia. In the 90s and early 2000 it was the leading tech company in the world. They missed the boat neglecting that making smaller phones was an attribute driven paradigm of their innovation strategy. Even when Blackberry (also a company nobody remembers anymore) became a first multi communication device, Nokia didn’t challenge their strategy. Innovation management requires continuous bravery to doubt existing belief systems.
3. Using Creativity without clearly defining a human context and tensions: Companies don’t trust the consumer insight teams or are even afraid to rely on insights. Instead ideating based on creativity only is the core principle. If you cannot articulate human tensions in a given product usage context, you won’t understand where creativity needs to focus. Creativity then gets the status of artistry and people celebrate quantity of ideas. Once creativity is directed by true human insights it delivers stunning solutions.
4. Lack of commitment to develop insights: Although many companies claim that they are consumer centric, they are factually led by the reality of short-termism of finance departments. Those companies never put the money there where their mouth is. They reduce budgets for insight departments with alibi explanations. If you want to be consumer centric with your company then commit yourself to it.
5. Understanding how consumer Insight is translated into new product design: What is the quality and nature of relevant insights to guide successful innovation? Doing a set of qualitative immersions with consumers is hardly enough to define specific criteria and requirements for successful new products and services. Many companies lack rigor and clarity on how to structure the argumentation from defining consumer needs towards product/service design features and related consequences for technology developments.

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