I have been thinking a lot about why innovation fails. Not about why supposedly innovative new products fail, because there are multiple reasons for that. A product could be too early or too late in the market window, or it could simply have the wrong pricing or distribution. A new product may lack key features or components, or like some successful products, take years to build an audience. I’m actually more interested in the 90-percent or more of ideas that never make it to product development. Why is there so much failure at the front end of innovation?

I was going to describe the failures at the front end, but that seemed too negative. If we can identify why ideas and processes fail, then we can begin to add value to innovators everywhere. So, first a brief segue into the importance and value of failure, then six ideas to implement to increase innovation success in the front end.

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