3 Common Innovation Mistakes You Must Avoid

Do you often find that innovative ideas with great potential are not working out for some reason? Is that a repeating phenomenon? If your answer is yes, something might be wrong with your company’s innovation management process. Time to take a closer and critical look at the current innovation process. You might discover that you are falling behind due to common innovation mistakes. Let’s explore them together and see how to avoid them as much as possible!

3 Common Innovation Mistakes You Might Make

1. Mistaking Innovation for Creativity

Understanding the difference between creativity and innovation is one of the crucial aspects of innovation management. Creativity involves coming up with new ideas and changing your perspective of looking at things. But innovation happens only when you turn these ideas into actual products or services. So, while every innovation is a result of creativity, not all creative ideas manifest into successful innovation. Often, companies spend a lot of resources and time brainstorming new ideas. But then, delays are the crux of the innovation process, i.e., execution. Thus, great ideas with immense potential end up pinned as just another sticky note in your office.

To avoid this innovation mistake, consider focussing on two or three excellent ideas instead of investing time and resources on a hundred other average ideas. Also, while selecting the ideas, make sure that they align with your company’s goals and organizational capability. Otherwise, you may get stuck in the execution phase, which is even worse.

2. Rushing the Innovation Process

Just like delaying the execution of an idea creates bottlenecks in the innovation process, the extreme opposite — rushing the process — is equally damaging. Some innovation managers tend to rush the innovation process by skipping some very important steps in order to move forward faster. Well, it is true that to thrive in this ever-changing market, you have to be fast. But, this should not happen at the cost of quality. Speed is of little use if your product or service is not up to the mark with the market requirements. Ultimately, if it fails to meet internal and external quality standards, it will not cater to the expectations of consumers. This leads to financial as well as reputational losses.

So, how do you deal with this strategic mistake and do it the right way? Instead of skipping necessary steps, allocate more resources to the project or use time more efficiently. This will speed up the process organically. For example, you can replace some of the tedious manual tasks with digital solutions such as SaaS tools for innovation management.

3. Not Failing at All

You must be wondering — isn’t failing a bad thing? We would let Elon Musk answer your question, “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” So, if you are not failing at all, it means you are not pushing the bar, you are playing it safe to avoid innovation risks by staying within your comfort zone. You are focussing on not losing rather than winning. This approach might work for a while. But, after a point in time, when your customers expect game-changing products and services from you, you will end up offering them the same old. This will, in turn, affect brand loyalty. Also, it is needless to mention that, the dynamic market does not take long to throw away the boring ones.

The antidote to this innovation mistake is to fail — just a little bit. Don’t hesitate to take risks. But, at the same time, prepare a solid risk mitigation strategy to be confident in taking them. Try out exciting new ideas — they might disrupt your industry! Don’t toss them away in the bin just because they seem risky. Never assume — try it out and see. You never know, it might do wonders!

Now, you tell us — do you relate to these innovation mistakes? What are the other mistakes that you have committed at some point and what have you learned from them? Get in touch & let us know!