Five common innovation mistakes and how to avoid them
Innovation is essential to stay competitive and grow. However, many businesses fall into common innovation mistakes. Over 90% of innovation projects end in failure.* How come? The Innovation Practice Team at ORTEC lists five common mistakes organizations make when pursuing innovation, and how to avoid them.
*Source: CIO
1. Ignoring customer feedback
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is ignoring customer feedback. You shouldn’t just fall in love with your idea; innovation should always be driven by customer needs and desires. Testing and validating with real users is therefore an important aspect. Receiving feedback from users can be scary, especially when you’re attached to your idea. However, failure to gather and act on customer feedback can lead to innovations that don't resonate with customers, and ultimately fail. At the same time, keeping an open mind and welcoming feedback allows you to learn from users and ultimately, to tweak and improve your idea.
Tip: Test and validate with real users
2. Being afraid of failure
Statistically, of 4.000 ideas, only 200 become new products, and only 2 or 3 survive the first 3 years. Most of the 4.000 ideas will fail. Is your idea not the big commercial success you were hoping for? Please don’t assume it’s all wasted, because in the end, you’ve learned precious lessons about your users, what works, and what does not.
Tip: Embrace risks and precious lessons learned
"Statistically, of 4.000 ideas, only 200 become new products, and only 2 or 3 survive the first 3 years."
3. Designing from your own perspective
The most successful form of innovation is needs-driven innovation. The starting point of this is a deep understanding of your user and their problems. When starting from the solution often results in creating something around our own perspective rather than that of the users. The solution may be viable and feasible but serves no one’s needs.
Tip: Needs-driven innovation
4. Waiting too long before bringing it to the market
“There’s only one chance to make a first impression”. This is also true with new products. It’s tempting to delay the market launch until you dotted all the i's and crossed the t's, and the product is as complete as possible. On the other hand, all new products are built on top of assumptions and delaying market launch also means delaying validation of those assumptions.
Tip: Consider launching your product without it being fully completed
5. Rushing the process
Just like going too slow and perfectionating your product before getting it out there, rushing the process and skipping important steps is detrimental for innovation. In a fast-changing world it sometimes feels like we must be fast, but this should never happen at the cost of impact for customers and users.
Tip: You can be fast, but not at the cost of impact for customers and users