Why Innovation Fails: A Risk Management Problem

Spending money on innovation is often hard to justify. You are investing to create future opportunities; yet the size and attractiveness of those opportunities are, at best, uncertain and, at worst, purely hypothetical. 

And yet, companies need opportunities. In today’s economy, more than ever, standing still means going backwards. Keeping pace requires rowing against the current of technological and business change. 

Since the professionalization of innovation management around the turn of the century, robust methods have emerged to evaluate the business case and potential value of innovation activities. In many organizations, the business case itself is no longer the core issue. Instead, innovation is constrained by how risk is perceived, assessed, and governed. After all, business leaders lack intuition for businesses they have never experienced before. Statistical methods offer guidance, but only by drawing parallels to developments that are inevitably imperfect comparisons. As a result, innovation risk is difficult to articulate, assess, and debate. 

In this webinar, we explore how to qualify and quantify innovation risk and, more importantly, how to actively manage risk and risk perception across an innovation portfolio.