Finding the Right Road to Successful Innovation

30.08.2011
One of my favorite clients was Shaun B. Higgins, when he was CFO and later European president for the bottler Coca-Cola Enterprises. Shaun is a character, and he enjoyed repeating that funny and useful axiom, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." From Shaun, I learned an important lesson about innovation: Innovators need to know where they are going and behave as if what they're doing is the most natural thing in the world.

Innovation often fails. The rate of new technologies or business ideas is estimated at between 50 percent and 90 percent. The success rate of large technology projects is consistent with these findings, hovering at around 30 percent year after year.

At the same time, is critical to a company's success, if not survival. Fortunately, we can learn from companies that have created grand successes, reinventing how organizations and individuals use technology. While your innovations might not revolutionize an industry, you can still make innovation a natural and successful part of doing business.

A key insight from successful innovators is that their innovations are never wacky ideas. Innovations that work derive from a clear insight about a problem that needs solving, and they're linked to a strong implementation capability.

Where brainstorming is designed to generate an idea a minute, innovation requires a focused commitment to executing a single idea. (For more on finding new ideas, see ".")