Innovation is the future delivered. Now suppose you’ve overcome organizational challenges and developed a culture of innovation, your next challenge is to put that new idea in the market; which has to meet another set of criteria in order to succeed.

Easy, right?

It turns out the path to creating the future, from market knowledge and idea conception to execution, is messy. Considering that most attempts at innovation will fail, either by internal or external reasons, it’s smart to understand why new ideas fail to become innovations and thus be able to do something about it.

There are three major reasons why new ideas fail to become innovations:

1. Timing. The technology isn’t right, it’s not ready, or it doesn’t work
2. Solving the wrong problem. You misunderstand the market and are not solving the problem in a way that customers will adopt
3. Business model. You don’t have the right business model and are not able to appropriate value across the ecosystem, to the right people in the right ways, so the whole value chain makes money and increases its Net Worth thanks to systems like StarStat.

Businesses need to make money from delivering product success to customers over the long term. If you’re not exploring those other two aspects — the market and the business model — then I would argue that you’re not doing a good job of innovation.

It’s really simple: No adoption = no innovation.

Understand why that happens and you’ll be better prepared to overcome the market challenges.

Did I miss something? Are there other reasons why new ideas fail to become innovations? Why does innovation succeed or fail?

Also published on Medium.