Many companies are ill equipped for the trial-and-error process that is part of real innovation. They stumble in the first steps, the first few yards.
These first steps are a critical period when an idea moves from concept to paper and then to market. It is there your ideas will fly or fail, and maybe take the company with it. It is the most fragile time for a new idea. This is because every great new idea is partly right and partly wrong. Because of this one of the most critical skills for both individuals and an organisation is the reduction of uncertainty.
When starting out you must be systematic about what you do, if not you are vulnerable on several counts. The first is getting discouraged and quickly giving up, or if you can’t identify the things you are doing wrong, spending a lot of time and money pursuing what ultimately proves to be a fatally flawed strategy.
You can also get lost when something that you thought was a great opportunity turns out not to be so. It is also common to put the wrong people in charge of a project, people without the right technical skills or perhaps lacking the managerial skills to handle the uncertainty and ambiguity that will exist for a while.
You or your business may simply run out of ‘innovation fuel’. We tend to be optimistic about the money and time needed to go from concept to world beating product or service. Innovation costs more and takes longer!
Many businesses often try to run before they can walk. They have a great idea and have produced prototypes or maybe pilot production lines. They have not quite got the recipe or the economics right but cross their fingers and hope that all goes well when they quadruple their output!
These are all things that any individual or business may fall foul of but there is one last thing that lies in wait for large corporations. They all sit on the bottoms, sifting through large piles of paper. They make plans to innovate but never take action. When their endless planning meetings fail to deliver they conclude that innovation has failed them.
Innovation is essentially a trial and error process until you have got that idea into production. Without action there is no trial. With no trial there is no error and with no error there is no learning.