101 Design Methods

Innovation (n): a viable offering that is new to a specific context and time, creating user and provider value

As firms like Apple and Google top the headlines and grab the attention of executives everywhere, just about every professional magazine, journal, conference, and meeting room today is awash with the term “innovation.” Innovation has arrived, and it has made a huge splash in the world of business. Except that it hasn’t. Despite the fact that there is so much attention on the strategic value of innovation, very few organizations know how to make it a reliable and repeatable practice. Business history speaks for itself. Research shows that less than 4 percent of the innovation projects undertaken by businesses are proven successful according to a source from Doblin Inc. The remaining 96 percent of the projects fail.

If innovation is so important, why aren’t more organizations better at it? Why are innovation failure rates still this high? To begin with, there are four major assumptions organizations make that prevent them from achieving systemic innovation. Let’s examine each of these assumptions one by one, and discover why they are incorrect and why there might be a better way of reliably achieving major innovation.

Assumption: Innovation as it is currently practiced is good enough.

Reality: Current innovation practices don’t reliably deliver breakthroughs. There is a ...