In defense of brainstorming

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

Amimages I the only one who’s getting tired of constant bashing of brainstorming?

The latest attack that I saw, coming from Forbes, begins with the following rhetoric question: “Have you ever sat through a fruitless brainstorming session and wondered—who came up with this, anyway?” I sure have. But let me ask a couple of questions of my own. Have you even seen a guy owning all imaginable Black & Decker home improvement tools and yet unable to hit a nail in the wall? I sure have. Or, have you even seen a gal in the top-notch kitchen full of Williams-Sonoma gadgets–and a refrigerator packed with Whole Foods stuff–and yet unable to fry a couple of eggs? I sure have too. Why are we blaming a tool for the operator’s inability to use it?

One has to remember that Alex Osborn, the father of brainstorming, published his seminal book describing the technique (“Your Creative Power: How to Use Imagination”) back in 1948. Characteristically, most studies on human creativity that are now invoked to criticize brainstorming were conducted more than 50 years after publication of Osborn’s book. Isn’t it funny that folks who’re used to updating their smartphones every other year didn’t take advantage of new data to update the brainstorming approach? Instead, they continue bashing its original, 66-year-old version. It’s like arguing that the Watson & Crick double-helix model of DNA published in 1953 “doesn’t work” because it doesn’t include all subsequent additions and refinements to it.

One also has to remember that Osborn invented brainstorming to serve his specific needs: to generate ad ideas. This may explain why he insisted on suspending criticism during the initial stages of brainstorming, an anathema to all its modern-day bashers. Forget about shutting off shy members of the group; if you go for a large number of ideas–and that’s how you generate ads only a few words long (“My husband is a pharmacist”)–do you have time to discuss any of them in particular? I moderated brainstorming sessions with high-tech companies and saw fist-hand groups of incredibly creative individuals struggling to come up with more than 3-4 ideas–simply because complex technical problems don’t have hundreds or even dozens feasible solutions to them. Naturally, discussing these ideas, including harsh criticism of them, started as soon as an idea was articulated. Does my refinement of Osborn’s approach to fit my particular needs mean that the original doesn’t work?

One more thing. More often than not, the list of brainstorming’s real and perceived faults is followed by offering another, supposedly more effective, ideation tool. So it’s not like “brainstorming doesn’t work”; it’s more like “brainstorming doesn’t work; try my approach instead.”

Am I the only one who smells a sale pitch here?

image credit: creativityseminar.blogspot.com   

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The last mile of a marathon

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

In the mid oimagesf September, my daughter ran–and finished!–her first marathon, and as a parent, I’m very proud of her. She then decided to take a short break from running: first, to get much needed rest for her body, and second, to take care of some personal business left neglected due to the rigorous marathon preparation schedule. So it took her a few weeks to return to the running trail, and a couple of days ago, she ran her first post-marathon distance, only 3 miles long. Although her body felt quite rested, my daughter was surprised with how difficult it was for her to finish these 3 miles. “You would expect that a person who’s just run 26 miles shouldn’t feel troubled with running only 3,” complained she to me over the phone. “Yet, I’ve barely made it.”

We talked a little bit about it and it became apparent to both of us that the problem was mental, not physical. When my daughter set her mind on running the whole 26 miles, the first couple dozens of them passed completely unnoticed, and the real struggle began during a few last miles. But when she knew that the target was only 3 miles, the most difficult last mile came in almost instantly.

I see an interesting parallel here with the way we set targets for our innovation projects. Yes, I know: these targets must be realistic. Setting unrealistic targets increases our chances of failure, which, despite the burgeoning movement to celebrate it, still damages the innovation group’s morale and credibility, to say nothing about the team members’ career prospects. So we quietly settle for what we euphemistically call “early wins,” which in reality are no more than easily achievable half-targets. Yet, quite interestingly, we then often struggle to hit even these “relaxed” targets because…well, because the last mile is always the last mile.

We routinely hear complaints that our innovation is too “incremental” (as opposed to being “breakthrough” or “radical”). In fact, there is nothing wrong with incremental innovation per se, for it represents the basis of any balanced innovation portfolio. The problem arises when incremental innovation is not a well-planned and carefully implemented process of improvement of a company’s core offerings, but rather an aborted attempt at innovation radical. Instead of covering the whole marathon distance, we run until we feel that our muscles get stony and our lungs begin gasping for air. At this point, we walk off the trail and declare mission accomplished (and celebrate an early win instead of a failure).

Am I trying to compare radical innovation to a marathon? Why not? After all, radical innovation and marathon have at least one thing in common: you don’t do it every single day.

image credit: DietDiva

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Are We Going Crazy about Using the Word “Innovation”?

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

Lowe'sThis past weekend, I made a routine shopping trip to Lowe’s. Strolling around the store, I was stunned to see a large poster marking the entry to one of the aisles: New Innovation. My first reaction was that this was a mistake and that the two words belonged to two different writings. But no, below the “New Innovation” in English, there was a version of the same in Spanish: La Nuova Innovacion. Unable to restrain my curiosity, I walked down this particular aisle trying to find any goods deserving such an ambitious description. I found nothing: the aisle was full of the usual stuff–mostly plywood–that I’ve seen there before (unless, of course, I missed some new and highly innovative sizes).

For a split second, I entertained an idea to approach the Lowe’s personnel and ask them what exactly “new innovation” means. And, perhaps, inquire whether they’re going to create a section “Innovation on Sale.” Then, for the reasons anyone can understand, I rejected this idea.

Are we going crazy about using the word “innovation”? I already wrote that innovation has become a buzzword, with inevitable dilution of its original meaning and unfortunate attempts to use it to describe something innovation is not. I can understand the desire of the Lowe’s management to impress visitors of their stores with catchy slogans. Yet, by doing this in such a silly way, they mislead not only them but they own employees as well.  Either way, this is a huge disservice to the Lowe’s brand.

No, I don’t call for a word police; nor do I see any sense in having one. I do however expect marketing professionals working for retail sector understand the meaning of words they’re using. And I really expect them paying respect to innovation–as an innovation manager and as a consumer.

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Working a Crowd

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

imagesIf crowdsourcing has not yet become a mainstream innovation tool, this is definitely not for the lack of attention. Crowdsourcing remains a topic of intense academic studies, and a recent paper by researchers from Simon Frazer University in Canada is a case in point. Written by John Prpic and co-authors and titled “How to Work a Crowd: Developing Crowd Capital through Crowdsourcing,” the article provides some theoretical background and practical guidance to managers wanting to use crowdsourcing to advance their business objectives. Presented below are a few key points I’ve extracted from the paper along with my comments.

  1. The authors begin with a crowdsourcing typology. They define crowdsourcing as “an on-line, distributed problem solving model…[that allows]…approaching crowds and asking for contributions [that] can help organization develop solutions to a variety of business challenges.” Using a number of criteria, Prpic et al. divide crowdsourcing into four categories: crowd-voting, idea crowdsourcing, micro-task crowdsourcing and solution crowdsourcing. Naturally, there are differences between the four categories in the ways crowdsourced information is collected and processed; consequently, Prpic et al. suggest that managers clearly understood their business needs to match them to a specific crowdsourcing category.

My comment: Defining and categorizing things is what academic researchers are especially good at. I like their definition of crowdsourcing, and their typology looks solid. My only concern is that for managers who have no prior experience with crowdsourcing, choosing between different crowdsourcing types might be too complicated, if not outright intimidating. My advice to them would be this: remember that above all other things, crowdsourcing is a question. And it doesn’t really matter what this question is about, for as long as it is well-thought-out, properly defined and clearly articulated. So, forget for now about definitions and typology; focus instead on problem definition and try to understand what kind of responses will represent a solution to your problem. If this understanding will be expressed in a simple and coherent problem statement followed by in a set of clear-cut requirements to a successful solution, your crowdsourcing campaign will be just fine.    

  1. The other indispensable part of any crowdsourcing campaign, in addition to a problem, is a crowd, and Prpic et al. correctly point out the need to “construct” a crowd. Two aspects are especially important in this context: the size of the crowd and its composition. The authors seem to favor an idea that larger crowds are generally more advantageous than smaller ones; however, they also see benefits of working with smaller (“closed”) crowds. At the same time, they state that “[d]ifferent crowds possess different knowledge, skills and other resources, and accordingly, can bring different types of value to an organization.” Taking to a logical conclusion, that would mean that organization should try to construct a customized crowd for each crowdsourcing campaign.

My comment: Constructing crowds of meaningful size and diversity is a long and          expensive process. Sure, once “constructed,” the crowds can be custom-modified, and available technology makes this task feasible. Yet, I’d strongly advise against playing too much with crowd size and composition. First, selecting “correct” participants for your crowdsourcing campaign only makes sense if you know them all. This is possible if you work with crowds composed of your own employees and/or a pool of trusted collaborators (academic partners, suppliers, selected customers, etc.). However, if you go outside your company–when using external innovation portals or innovation intermediaries–such a selection becomes cost-ineffective at best and outright impossible at worst. Second, even more importantly, the popular belief that only people with “relevant knowledge and expertise” can solve your problem is plain wrong. The experience of crowdsourcing experts, such as InnoCentive, clearly shows that innovation can come from completely unexpected–and therefore unpredictable–sources; moreover, it was proven time and again, that a solver’s likelihood of solving a problem actually increases with the distance between the solver’s own field of technical expertise and the problem’s domain. Instead of trying to select correct “solvers” to their problem, managers would better spend time to describe what a correct “solution” to this problem should be. As pointed above, composing a powerful problem statement followed by in a set of clear-cut requirement to a requested solution is a better way to make your crowdsourcing campaign successful.

  1. The authors emphasize the fact that simply engaging a crowd and successfully acquiring the desired contributions is not enough for the ultimate success of a crowdsourcing campaign. Equally important is a process of internal assimilation of the acquired crowdsourced information. To achieve this goal, organizations “need to institute internal organizational processes to organize and purpose the incoming knowledge and information.”

My comment: Here I completely agree with Prpic et al., for I’ve witnessed first-hand multiple examples of nicely designed and skillfully implemented crowdsourcing campaigns that became eventual failures just because the campaign organizers had no established internal structure to “marry” outside knowledge with the one produced inside. First, more often than not, outside knowledge, especially collected in the course of solution crowdsourcing, comes only “half-baked,” i.e. in need of further processing using internal resources. Second, there is a cultural aspect: the notorious “not invented here” syndrome is alive and well and is capable of preventing external knowledge from taking hold in any organization. Managers who dream of using crowdsourcing should therefore start with “internal crowdsourcing” that would bring together their own employees first. Such internal crowdsourcing could be run through internal innovation networks (INNs). INNs not only  foster the very culture of collaboration, bringing together corporate units (R&D, business development, marketing, etc.) that in many organizations often have no institutional platform to communicate on strategic issues; they also provide intellectual and operational support for the company’s external innovation programs. Once an organization has mastered the process of internal crowdsourcing, going outside often means just expanding its technological capabilities (the existence of other important issues, such as IP protection, notwithstanding).

In conclusion, academic literature keeps producing useful examples of “best practices” in using crowdsourcing to solve various technological and business problems. Yet, as we all know, the best practices are those that work specifically for our organization. So managers aspiring to become masters of crowdsourcing should not feel paralyzed by the growing amount of (often conflicting) crowdsourcing literature; they should start running their own crowdsourcing campaigns. After all, the best–and the only–way to learn swimming is to get into the water.

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Not All Innovation Models Are Created Equal

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

downloadIt’s one of the most popular topics in innovation discussions: why innovation fails? How many times have you heard the following narrative? With great fanfare, the XYZ Company launches an innovation initiative. Employees are urged to submit ideas, and a great number of these are generated in short time. And then…nothing happens. The vast majority of the ideas are simply useless, but for a few that make sense, there is no budget. As unwanted ideas pile up, the employee enthusiasm wanes. The initiative quietly dies, and innovation becomes “a four-letter word.”

The usual suspects to blame have long been identified: poor customer insight, the lack of executive leadership, the lack of innovation strategy, weak innovation culture–make you pick. Yet no one seems to ask a simple question: does the model of innovation described above work?

In organizations, innovation can flow in two major directions: bottom-up and top-down. In the bottom-up model, the one the XYZ Company has chosen, the focus of innovation is on ideas. The ideas are collected on the ground and then channeled up to the organization’s leadership. The popularity of this model is fueled by a widespread belief that innovation must harness a collective wisdom of the whole organization. Unfortunately, the bottom-up model has a number of serious flaws. First, employees, especially those at lower steps of the organizational ladder, usually have only a vague understanding of the strategic goals of the organization; consequently, their ideas are often completely misaligned with the organization’s real needs. Second, the burden of evaluating and implementing submitted ideas usually falls on business units that already have a full load of their own stuff. To make room for “newcomers,” business units have to kill their existing projects, and killing projects is not something organizations are good at. Third, in most large organizations R&D budgets for the next year are usually drafted no later than the Q3 of the prior year. That means that new projects receive no immediate funding and have to wait for at least a few months to get paid for, at which point their utility is often highly questionable (not to mention how detrimental this delay is to employee morale). One can go on with the criticism, but the bottom line is that for organizations with shorter history of innovation programs the bottom-up model of innovation doesn’t work.

Is there a plausible alternative? Yes, it’s the top-down approach. In the top-down model of innovation, the focus is on problems. The organization’s leadership formulates problems that are crucial for the organization and then moves them down the ladder for employees to suggest solutions to these problems. The ways the problems are presented to the employees may vary and can include innovation jams, innovation contests or challenges posted to internal innovation networks. The benefits of this approach are numerous. First, for as long as the problem addresses an organization’s strategic need, submitted solutions will always “make sense,” regardless of whether they’re successful or not. Second, coming from the top of the organization, the proposed problem from the very beginning has its own executive sponsor whose responsibility is to ensure proper funding for effective solutions. Third, the organization remains in full control of the number of innovative initiatives it pursues: if it can afford multiple initiatives launched in parallel, fine; if it struggles with the lack of resources, single initiatives can be handled one at a time. Finally, giving specific feedback to the employees about the value of their solutions is much easier and productive than explaining to them why their ideas were ignored. Regardless of whether an employee “wins” or “loses” an innovation contest, he or she feels engaged and appreciated.

No, I’m not saying that the bottom-up model of innovation has no right to exist. In mature organizations–where employees know what kind of innovation the organization needs; where a robust protocol for evaluating unsolicited ideas exists; where a special fund to pay for “spontaneous” projects is set aside–it can be remarkably successful. But if your organization is at the very beginning of a long, bumpy road to innovation glory, going top-down is the way to go.

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Innovativeness=Competitiveness

Posted on September 3, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

The Gldownloadobal Competitiveness Report 2014-15 is out. It’s described as an assessment of the “competitiveness of 144 economies based on 12 “pillars” which include institutions, infrastructure, health and education, labor market efficiency, technological readiness, innovation and business sophistication.” Here is the list of the countries that make the top 10 of the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI):

  1. Switzerland
  2. Singapore
  3. United States
  4. Finland
  5. Germany
  6. Japan
  7. Hong Kong
  8. Netherlands
  9. United Kingdom
  10. Sweden

Looks familiar? It should. The top of the Global Competitiveness Index looks remarkably similar to the top of the Global Innovation Index 2014 (GII) (I wrote about it recently). Here is the top 10 countries from this year’s GII:

  1. Switzerland
  2. United Kingdom
  3. Sweden
  4. Finland
  5. Netherland
  6. United States
  7. Singapore
  8. Denmark
  9. Luxembourg
  10. Hong Kong

Admittedly, there are two countries that made the first list, but not the second (Germany and Japan) and there are two countries that made the second, but not the first (Denmark and Luxembourg); other than that, the usual suspects are just trading places a bit, with Switzerland being the number one in both lists.

Do we need any extended comments? No. The conclusion is clear: to be competitive, countries must innovate. A shorter version of the same: innovativeness=competitiveness.

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What Can Crowdsourcing Do?

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

I’m often askeimagesd questions about crowdsourcing. Usually, they’re revolving around this central theme: what can crowdsourcing do? Can crowdsourcing solve this problem? Can crowdsourcing solve that problem? On occasion, a more perceptive question is posed: can crowdsourcing define a problem?

My answer to all these questions is standard: yes, it can. What I want my interlocutors to understand is that crowdsourcing is first and foremost a question, a question that you ask a carefully selected crowd of people. And it doesn’t really matter what this question is about, for as long as it well-thought-out, properly defined and clearly articulated. Yes, it can be a question about a solution to a problem. Yes, it can be a question about a problem itself.

Two examples of using crowdsourcing in both incarnations came from the same organization, Harvard Medical School. The first example shows how HMS scientists used crowdsourcing to solve a problem. This particular problem was how to improve the capacity of a DNA sequencing algorithm employed in one of the HMS projects. (Let me skip technical details here because I wrote about this case only a few weeks ago.) HMS first decided to solve the problem in-house and indeed made a significant (5.5-fold) improvement in the algorithm capacity. But this wasn’t enough, and they launched a two-week-long crowdsourcing campaign. 122 algorithms from the outside of HMS have been submitted, and the winning solution provided a 1,000-fold improvement over the initial algorithm, a 180-fold improvement over the internal solution.

But a few years before, HMS put the crowdsourcing approach in reverse: they use it to define a problem. Specifically, they asked a question: what do we not know to cure Type 1 diabetes? The idea behind the question was that as every prominent scientific topic, the Type 1 diabetes research was following a limited number of popular directions, chasing essentially the same set of problems. HMS decided to ask members of the Harvard community, as well as general public, to identify “neglected” problems, the problems that for whatever reasons were off the radars of existing labs involved in Type 1 diabetes research. Essentially HMS wanted the crowd to come up with different, better problems, regardless of whether the crowd had the expertise or resources to solve these problems.

The results were quite impressive. Of total of about 190 entries to the contest, 12 were chosen as the most “out-of-the-box.” (Interestingly enough, among people submitting winning proposals was a diabetes patient, an undergraduate student, an HR representative and a researcher with no immediate expertise in the diabetes field.) Some of the most promising problems were later converted into bona fide research projects.

So when asked what one needs to run a successful crowdsourcing campaign, my answer is, only two things: a question and a crowd.

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New Survey: Incentivizing Employees to Innovate

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

(This post originally appeared on Innovation Excellence)

More and moreto-be-or-not-to-be-thats-the-question-257x300 businesses view innovation as a new paradigm for achieving competitive advantage. Now businesses must focus on how to make the innovation process more effective. Experts and innovation practitioners agree that innovation programs thrive in organizations that have established a culture of innovation. They also agree that a culture of innovation is first and foremost a culture of employee engagement: for innovation programs to succeed, organizations must ensure employee participation in these programs.

A question then arises: should organizations incentivize employee participation in innovation programs? Opinions diverge on this issue. Some argue that innovation is based on creativity, and creativity relies mostly on intrinsic motivators, such as natural curiosity or thrill of solving a difficult problem. Extrinsic motivators, including financial incentives, can therefore do little to make a person more innovative. Others insist that innovation is not different from other business processes; consequently, established corporate incentives (formal and informal, monetary and non-monetary) should be used to reward and recognize innovation activities.

To gain more insight into this issue, Doug Williams of IX Research and I are conducting a study to evaluate whether and how employee engagement increases the efficiency of innovation programs. The research aims to answer the following key questions:

  • Does employee engagement have a positive impact on the success of innovation programs?
  • Do organizations provide incentive to employees to encourage participation in
    innovation programs?
  • What specific forms of recognition or reward do organizations use to encourage employee participation in innovation programs?

Whether you’re a seasoned innovation practitioner or just thinking about establishing innovation programs in your organization, we want to know your opinion. You can participate in the study by using the following link.  Those who complete the survey will receive a copy of the aggregate survey results. The data we gather will be used to develop an IX Research report that provides guidance and recommendations to corporate innovation teams, human resources departments, and C-suite executives about how best to engage employees in the innovation process.

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All Innovation Is Local

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

Picture1I like this phrase: all politics is local. Ascribed to the late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Tip O’Neill this phrase means that all political decisions, regardless of their purpose and scale, must take into account the interests of local constituents, the folks who’re sending politicians into the offices.

In a sense, innovation is local too. What I mean by this is that no matter how many “general rules” of innovation we might invent, every industry and every field would modify these rules to fit its specific needs and circumstances. Take, for example, rapid prototyping. Everyone would agree that the efficiency of the innovation process can be dramatically improved by creating of a quick-and-dirty version of new product or service, allowing immediate assessment of their feasibility, scale-up potentials and, mostly important, attractiveness to end-users. Such a rapid prototyping not only speeds up the innovation pace; it also saves a lot of money by the timely weeding out failed options (remember the “fail fast, fail cheap” mantra?). Rapid prototyping has proven its worth in many cases, most notably, in software and consumer goods markets.

But is rapid prototyping feasible in every field? Unfortunately, not. Consider drug development. There are a number of research tools– in vitro and in vivo systems, animal models of human diseases, etc.–that could conceivably serve as “quick-and dirty” prototypes for testing the efficiency of candidate drugs. However, in such a tightly regulated business as drug development, this isn’t enough. The proof that a candidate drug works–and this is the only proof that matters to the FDA–comes as late as in the Phase III clinical trial. As I pointed out in my previous post, there are two extremely troubling aspects of Phase III clinical trials: first, they are shamefully expensive, costing up to a billion dollars, and, second, horribly failure-prone, with roughly 30-40% of Phase III clinical trials ending up in failures. Is it then surprising that while investment in pharmaceutical R&D has doubled since 1997, the number of approved drugs for the same period has been largely stagnant? Any approach that would allow reliable estimate of drug efficiency before Phase III clinical trial (rapid prototyping of sorts) would have dramatic positive effect on the whole process of drug development.

Or take the celebrated Voice of the Customer (VOC) approach. It’s a common place now to say that any successful innovation must start with identifying unmet customer needs. Or, wording this in more practical ways, when starting to design a new product or service, one must make sure that in the end, there will be consumers and customers willing to pay for this product/service. Consequently, a great number of techniques aimed at identifying what customers do or may want have been developed: market surveys, focus groups and ethnographic methods, to name just a few most popular.

The pharmaceutical industry uses the VOC approach too, but in a very specific way. In a sense, there is no need to identify unmet medical needs in drug development: diseases for which there is no cure are well known, and their list is, unfortunately, depressingly long. And, of course, there is no need to ask sick people whether they want to be cured. So the decision which specific disease should be attacked by a new drug development campaign isn’t made based on the customer wish. Instead, other factors are considered: the presence of a suitable (“druggable”) molecular target, available technology to reach this target, the size of the patient population expected to respond to the proposed drug, the anticipated willingness of the insurers to pay for the future treatment, etc. (Often, such decisions are clouded with interferences by external forces, such as patient advocacy groups; I wrote about this earlier.)

This is not to say that pharmaceutical companies completely refuse to listen to their customers. Over the past few years, companies have begun actively soliciting patient input into design of clinical trials–to make sure that the treatment protocols are patient-friendly enough to ensure high patient complacency. Transparency Life Sciences, which calls itself “the world’s first drug development company based on open innovation,” went a step further: it uses crowdsourcing to design clinical trial protocols for a number of indications.

So what is my point? My point is that as innovation management gets more matured, we should start creating customized sets of innovation tools appropriate for specific industries, disciplines and business functions. In other words, for innovation to realize its global appeal, it must go local.

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Should We Celebrate Failure Worth A Billion?

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Eugene Ivanov

As every popular topic, innovation is a powerful magnet for clichés. Some of them obliterate more than illuminate. For example, I’m not sure that mixing innovation with DNA is a good idea. Though I kind of understand what Clayton Christensen and his co-authors had in mind when writing about “the innovator’s DNA” (“…each individual…ha[s] a unique innovator’s DNA for generating breakthrough business ideas”), I involuntarily cringe when reading that “successful innovation programs have a DNA consisting of seven elements.” Ouch, these days even kindergarteners know that DNA consists of only four elements!

Another innovation cliché that really rubs me is “celebrating failure.” Sure, we all know that innovation requires a lot of experimentation, and experimentation results in failures more often that it ends up in success. Absolutely, we must accept failures, learn from them and try again and again, until we succeed. But why do we need celebrate failures?

In every language, in every culture, the word “failure” carries distinct negative connotation, and placing it in the same sentence with “innovation” makes no difference. By calling to celebrate innovation failures, we might be announcing our belonging to the Sacred Society of Innovators (i.e. those with a unique innovator’s DNA), but do very little to advance innovation in places, still depressingly numerous, where the fear of failure keeps nipping innovation in the bud.

Besides, some innovation failures are so expensive that they give more reasons to mourn rather than to celebrate. Take, for instance, drug development. Even empowered with recent scientific breakthroughs, modern drug development still remains highly unpredictable business. The ultimate proof that a candidate drug does have clinical benefits (meaning that it may be approved by the FDA for therapeutic treatment) comes as late as in the Phase III clinical trial. It was calculated that it costs about $1.3 billion to develop a new drug and that 90% of these expenses represent the cost of Phase III clinical trials. Do we have any reason to celebrate a failure worth a billion dollars, given the fact that the failure rate of Phase III clinical trials reaches the mind-boggling 30-40% (and even higher in some therapeutic areas, such as cancer)?

We shouldn’t treat innovation as it’s any different from other activities. We live in a success-driven society. We should strive for success, and success only, be it innovation project, manufacturing process or safety of our borders. We should work very hard on decreasing the rate of failures in any of these endeavors–and, sure, it’s time to address the question of why drug development has become so inefficient and expensive. And we should reserve celebration for those occasions, however rare, when we succeed.

I’m even ready to consider this attitude an element of our innovator’s DNA.

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