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Why Great Ideas Can Fail

By Don Norman - August 26, 2010

in Columns

Designers are proud of their ability to innovate, to think outside the box, to develop creative, powerful ideas for their clients. Sometimes these ideas win design prizes. However, the rate at which these ideas achieve commercial success is low. Many of the ideas die within the companies, never becoming a product. Among those that become products, a good number never reach commercial success. Why would brilliant ideas fail in the marketplace? The reasons are complex. Part of the problem is that design consultancies are outsiders, hired by one division of the company, but not necessarily accepted by the other divisions. A product, however, requires the support of the entire company: design and development, engineering and marketing, sales and service, supply chain and distribution chain. Products enter into a complex eco-system, both within and outside of the company. Successful products have to navigate a complex path. The idea and initial design is only one piece of the story.Design companies—and all consulting companies—do the fun part of the job. They waltz in, are given an assignment, go away and think, play, experiment, and ponder. They are free to break the rules, free to invent and tinker without the restrictions of corporate purchasing polices and interdepartmental politics. But in the end, when the brilliant new ideas have been laid out, prototyped, PowerPointed, memoed, and white-papered, they still have to get accepted by the rest of the company. This is where the hard part begins, but it is also precisely where the contract often ends. The designers leave and wonder what is happening within the company. In some cases, phone calls and emails don't get answered. In other cases, the contact person within the company voices frustration at the difficulties involved in moving forward. The rumor mill flourishes. Eventually the product either is presumed dead or something does indeed appear on the market, sometimes in a form barely recognizable by the design team. The designers (and all consultants, for that matter) are left to write share brilliant thoughts for the trade magazines, theÂ Harvard Business Review, or convention talks, disguising the company names, of course. Great Ideas Are Not Sufficient Why do these ideas often fail to take hold with the people, companies, and organizations they were meant to transform? The same phenomenon holds not only for the recommendations of design and business consultancies but even for internally generated ideas from the research, planning, and strategy parts of the company. This is a problem that has long bothered me. I used to run Apple's Advanced Technology Group. Many of our ideas were ignored. It took considerable interaction with the product groups, hours of sitting in on meetings, of working with their engineers and marketing teams to get acceptance. In many cases, the rejections were sensible. Then the problem was to educate the research team about the true needs of the product groups. This direction, I must confess, usually failed. The research community is remarkably ignorant about the world of business, often deliberately so. (See my essays on the research-practice gap.) Ideas are just the starting point toward product realization. New product ideas have to fit the competencies of the corporation. They have to fit within the existing family or products, or at least the product strategy. The purchasers of new products have to be prepared. The costs must be contained. The technology must be up to it. The same people who the new ideas are intended to supplant and go around are now responsible for executing the ideas. No wonder so many good ideas fail. Why Skunkworks Are Not the Answer Consider the case of skunkworks teams. These are special company teams asked to innovate, free from normal bureaucratic restrictions. Wikipedia defines a skunkworks as "a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects." Business professors love to use Lockheed Corporation's skunkworks team as an example of how a company can successfully innovate. The Lockheed team designed a number of successful military and spy planes. The lesson, we are often told, is that small startups are where innovation flourishes, so if a large corporation wants to innovate, it needs to mimic a startup, establishing small groups who can go off in isolation unhampered by committee reviews and autocratic rules that stifle innovation, slow up the necessary rapid purchases of essential items, and impose long, drawn-out committee reviews at every step along the way. "Get out of our way," say the teams. "Let us be isolated, hoist the pirate skull-and-crossbones flag of freedom from bureaucracy, and you will get great results." Alas, these teams invariably do great innovative work that then fails to get incorporated into the company's product lines. Skunkwork teams are like independent consultancies: they can do great work, but then they have the same trouble integrating their ideas with the needs, resources, talents, and political structure of the organization. Actually, they may have even more difficulty, for these are company employees who deliberately thumbed their noses at company procedures and processes. The Lockheed skunkworks was a special case because they only manufactured a small number of items for each project, usually handmade by the team itself. But when the idea has to become integrated as a mainstream product that has to be integrated back into the companies business, problems arise. Ideas either go nowhere or get badly transformed. Not all skunkwork projects fail to be accepted by the company. In my experience, however, the successes are all special cases with extenuating circumstances. Creativity requires breaking out of the mold, distancing the team from the corporate structure. Successful products and services require acceptance and buy-in from the corporate structure. These demands conflict. It is not enough to have great ideas: they ideas have to fit within the framework of the company and of the people who will ultimately purchase and use them. It is very difficult for a team to flaunt the company, brag that they are superior because they do not need to follow the rules, but then get successfully reabsorbed back into the company as heroes delivering a brilliant product. Just as the team rejected the company by staying outside; the company then rejects their ideas when they come back home. Making Innovation Succeed Creative ideas are never sufficient. After the fun part of creativity comes the difficult, dull, painstaking efforts to make those ideas fit the true needs of the organization and the customers, to make sure they are practical, implementable, cost-efficient, and profitable. These practical, hard-headed business and marketing issues are just as important as the creative side, conceivably even more important. In fact, most of the value of innovation comes from small, incremental change, not massive, paradigm-shifting change, in part because these enhancive the market size and efficiency of the operations, but also because they are readily accepted by the organization. Most innovations are simple enhancements of products, enhancements in supply chains, in manufacturing, packaging, marketing, and distribution. These small, incremental innovations are not as much fun to invent as the groundbreaking, revolutionary new product concept, but they add far more value. These innovations build on existing products. They refine the designs and manufacturing process to lower costs, enhance the user base, and expand the marketing and distribution. This is true whether the product be hardware, software or service. Moreover, small, local innovations are much more readily integrated into the product process than larger, more radical change. (See Larry Kelley's videos and writings.) Creative, paradigm changes are essential. But think about your own life. How many truly revolutionary changes have you experienced? And how long did each one take to become established? The number of truly revolutionary ideas is surprisingly small, perhaps just a few a year. The really revolutionary ones then took decades to become accepted. Innovation only succeeds when all the stars are aligned. The company has to have complete buy-in. The technology must be ready: inexpensive, robust, and effective. The supporting infrastructure must be in place. And the customer base must have already had sufficient exposure that they are willing to buy. Put all these together plus the funds and patience to wait the decade it takes for market size to become reasonable and you have an instant success. Is it any wonder that most startup companies fail, that most novel ideas don't take root in established companies, and that most radical ideas do come from startups that are willing to accept small market share for long periods? How is a design firm to cope? Here it is necessary to recognize the limitations of an outside consultancy. It is essential to get buy in from the entire company, which means insisting upon representatives from key constituencies across the entire product cycle as part of the process from day one. The period of the contract must extend through the entire product process to bridge the gaps across company divisions. Realize that the idea alone is not enough: it has to fit the business, the people, the customers, and the times. An idea that is ahead of its time is perhaps even worse than one that is behind the times. If ahead, the product may die. If behind, it can catch up, learning from the mistakes of competitors. A year ago, writing in Interactions, the magazine of the human-computer interaction community, I put it this way: "A successful product or service has to navigate a complex terrain of hurdles, constraints, technologies, and opportunities. There are myriad market forces, fundamental needs, competitive strategies, core competencies, and market adoption forces. And the product must deliver its promises, not only functioning well, but also providing pleasure in the interaction." No product is an island: Great ideas are necessary, but not sufficient.

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Rotkapchen

13 years ago

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To add another classic example to your list of failed, but brilliant spinoffs, EDS's C2O, which was rejected due to 'fit' http://www.texasmonthly.com/preview/1997-07-01/business And they had some phenomenal successes along the way http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/18803929/how-eds-made-sonys-e-business-sing.htm

It was all enough to put C2O as the 7th top Interactive Agency of 2000, just as most of the companies on the list were in a nosedive.
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Milind S. Pandit

13 years ago

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Excellent article.

Inventions dreamed up in the "ivory tower" face the full set of challenges mentioned. They may represent advances in engineering or design, but insufficient numbers of people are willing to pay for them.

The first person to see your innovation may be your client, but a close second must be the client's customer. Sufficiently positive reactions from sufficient numbers of customers will convince business people (at least the rational ones) to commercialize your innovation.
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Christine Crandell

13 years ago

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Don mentioned that a lot of products fail, and in fact it's estimated that about half of all products do. Additionally, 50% of all R&D investments never every yield an ROI. I wonâ€™t restate the great comments everyone has shared, but I donâ€™t think itâ€™s a problem that a design agencyâ€™s plans arenâ€™t vetted, changed and transformed by the corporation to align with whatâ€™s practical, their business strategy, etc. The challenge is further up in the process. Products fail because of the multitude of silos in organizations resulting in groups working across purposes and not towards a united company strategy.

Features get picked by the HiPPO (Highest Paid Personâ€™s Opinion) and management lacks the visibility into whatâ€™s going on. As a result design firms get blamed as good ideas get transformed into bad ones. Often the customer or the marketâ€™s needs, wants, desires and what they will pay for is not factored into the process. Without forcing people to justify design changes and providing visibility into why changes are made, innovation gets squashed where it should be enhanced.

Having said all that, I see a change in companies. Many are realizing that if they want to survive in this new economic reality they need to institutionalize a complete, end-to-end product innovation process that starts with market ideation and ends with product delivery. Those companies are calling the post-recession, the â€œinnovation economyâ€.

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Mani

13 years ago

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A quite practical post!

Conceptualizing alone doesn't suffice. In my opinion, the same passion and diligence which contributes in building a design should be shown in pushing the design for implementation. After all, a part of the success of a well thought design lies where you see people actually use the product which carries your ideas.

While conceptualizing, we need to ensure that our thoughts are geared towards solving the right problem. Hitting and solving the right problems is another key to making customers happy. Thanks.

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Alexander Debkalyuk

13 years ago

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Thanks! This makes many things clear...

It's just so hard to make designers remember they are not artists and have to play by the rules.

Often a small change in product can make a huge difference. Bigger then complete redesign... And redesign often leads to loosing loyal customers that just 'Don't want to learn another Word processor!' ;)
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M.A.WilkinsDESIGN

13 years ago

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Don,

As always your articles stir a dissonance within my own mind and force me to question what I think. I agree with you for the most part. Innovation separated from the rest of the parties involved is asking for mutiny but I would also argue that it is the responsibilities of these "special groups" to communicate not only their ideas but also their process. Are these groups not asked to create concepts as a means to DIRECT the company? They don't actually expect these groups to come up with a market ready product, right?
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Vinh Khoa

13 years ago

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I just wanna add one more point. I think one of the reasons innovations happen easier in startups is because they don't yet have a clear set of business objectives and a well-defined consumer market to go after. They are more or less still in the "exploring mode". As 37Signals puts it, it is the advantage of being small and startups should appreciate it and take advantage of it while they still can.
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Vinh Khoa

13 years ago

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Business objectives are everything. For your voice to be heard, your ideas to be appreciated, it has to align with and support those objectives.

I agree with what you said but I can also see the other side of the issue where business does not easily accept new inventions. If they blindly accept the experiments/ideas/inventions that their employees come up with, they might have failed even more miserably. Business could be behind deadlines and not profitable.

I think that is the key someone has to know when working in a commercial environment. Business objectives, profit in particular for most cases, is what drives what is done and what is left out.
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Steve

13 years ago

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Great article. I would add that an idea is not great unless it is implementable. "World peace" is a great idea, but you get credit until you explain how to roll it out.

As someone involved in design at a corporation, I have seen too many design consultancies visit for a few weeks and leave after creating only a "strategic vision" PowerPoint.

At the rates consultancies charge, it is hard to have the time to understand the problem, solve it and solve the many implementation details. But many consultants also lack the attitude to engage the subject matter fully and stick it through.

A better approach is spreading design thinking through an organization to foster and build on the ideas of those who know the subject best.

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Ko Nakatsu

13 years ago

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This article led me to your issue on the research-practice gap. As a practicing "translational developer", your focus on that gap is spot-on crucial. Coincidentally, I just wrote a quick piece on what I was calling the "Translation of Abstraction" ( http://lo13.com/attitude/2010/08/26/design-is-the-bridge-between-research-and-reality ) with an example project and may serve as one potential method for creating that bridge between research and design. It'd be great if you could take a peak. I also commented on a proposal for enhancing current skunkwork projects here: http://lo13.com/attitude/2010/08/26/adopt-ideas-like-puppies-and-babies/ [apologies for the formatting, comments do not seem to allow html tags]

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Ian Alexander

13 years ago

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I am of the opinion that companies/individuals within those companies least inclined to change are the the only ones left and therefore the most difficult to convince that change is required.

The idea of skunkworks team is intriguing and I'd be interested to hear about successful implementations.
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mark

13 years ago

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Great points Don - such truth !
I am sure the KEY to having everyone pull a project right through the company and out enthusiastically into the market is 'ownership'. ..As designers we have experience of this from being kids at school, thro to design school and group projects - 'choose MY idea' ... even in sophisticated high level brainstorming (even in at IDEO), human nature is to push own ideas, and glow when ideas are chosen. The key I find is to have enough confidence to allow others - with more influence, typically controlling marketing and distribution to take credit. Including design awards etc. !
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Heather White Laird

13 years ago

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You have clearly outlined the issues and roadblocks associated with great innovation. And it's true, they are well known and not going away anytime soon, however I hope you're not advocating for making only incremental changes because as you say "They add far more value". I assume you are saying that there is a need for both small and large change, and that they should operate in parallel and be required to be measured by a different metric. For as you well know, many times great innovation won't become recognized or valuable for years to come and then all those folks who fought it so hard in the past are the ones climbing on the bandwagon when it becomes successful.
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Shane Johnston

13 years ago

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Don,

As a designer in a 'skunkworks' operation; You hit the nail on the head with this one. It is certainly something that designers are not always aware of. We ride the thin dotted line of relevance not for lack of compelling ideas, but because of corporate politics and perpetual angling.

My best piece of advice in these situations (for designers) is to validate concepts with data. It is really easy for a PS guy/gal to shoot down the next greatest idea because of an additional 5cent item cost. The best way to combat financial science is with a science of equal regard.

Shane

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atohms

13 years ago

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I've learned in my experience over the past years that innovation in a product should also be clearly communicated to the user. It should still show what it does yet also show what is new about it and why it is better. A really difficult exercise sometimes since most people are afraid of new things. I love to take big leaps but the consumer doesn't always keep up ;)

Grtz
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