Why Is Innovation So Hard?

The article “Why Is Innovation So Hard?” outlines cultural challenges that prevent innovation from taking root. As we have discussed many times, development of disruptive capabilities can often fail to achieve their intended results.

This means that in order to innovate we need to change our attitude toward failures and mistakes. Contrary to what many of us have been taught, avoiding failure is not a sign that we’re smart. Being smart is not about knowing all the answers and performing flawlessly. Being smart is knowing what you don’t know, prioritizing what you need to know, and being very good at finding the best evidence-based answers. Being smart requires you to become comfortable saying, “I don’t know.” It means that you do not identify yourself by your ideas but by whether you are an open-minded, good critical and innovative thinker and learner.

Failing to fail…and then accelerating our success

Alphabet’s (Google) Project Loon team has an interesting blog post with some interesting thoughts for R&D managers trying to develop disruptive innovations or moonshots.

When you set out to explore a brave, new, weird place that no one’s ever explored before, you bring along a list of things you hope are true and right. And most of the time, you discover that you’re wrong about a lot of those things — which is why I spend so much time talking about failure being a necessary condition of moonshot-taking. I want to help our teams experience this as valuable learning rather than dispiriting setback.

We need to embrace risks and possibility of failure when targeting disruptive innovation. But we also need to manage risks…
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