“It’s absolutely ingrained in human nature that we simply assign responsibility for what went wrong instead of chalking it up to bad luck. And bad luck is out there. You can’t totally insulate yourself from it because if you try to, you really impair your ability to achieve good luck. And unfortunately, the world is sufficiently complex that you have to make the conditional assumption that you’re going to get some breaks along the line. Otherwise, you’re dead.” – Bob Hamman

Investing in innovation isn’t paying off for most companies. 93% of companies feel innovation is important, but only 18% believe it’s effective. That is the conclusion from a recent report from Accenture titled “Why low risk innovation is costly”. This isn’t surprising. 96% of all innovation investments don’t pay off. Of course, we’d love to flip that number and see our innovation efforts succeed 96% of the time. But, that will never be the case. It is something we have to accept.

I’m not being pessimistic. Luck plays a huge role in innovation. No matter how much expertise you’ve accumulated along the way, the simple act of doing things differently will make that expertise irrelevant. Accept it. Make peace with it. You have to expect and plan for the possibility of failure. There is a reason why we don’t see game-changing innovations. They are rare. For example, Google is a rare company that is betting on moonshots. Even so, with that intent, pundits are already saying that Google Glass and Google’s driver-less car will fail. Yet, most of us have yet to have contact with either product. When breakthroughs are attempted, skepticism is common.

Before setting out to innovate, we must remember a few things:…