The Eleven Deadly Sins of Innovation
Even the most successful companies can fall prey to missteps in their innovation efforts. Despite access to vast resources, renowned brands like Google, Coca-Cola, and Boeing have stumbled into common traps, undermining their bold visions with flawed execution.
Research identifies eleven frequently recurring failure modes — which we might call the "Eleven Deadly Sins" of innovation — and reveal that these repeating pitfalls come not from a lack of creativity, but from poor judgment, misaligned strategies, and unchecked assumptions.
These sins can be divided into three categories: the Sins of Inputs, Sins of Process, and Sins of Alignment and Culture. Through a series of case studies, we see how some of the world’s most iconic businesses have repeatedly fallen into these traps, and how their downfalls offer lessons for the future.
Sins of Inputs: Where Misunderstanding Customers Derails Ambition
At the heart of many innovation failures is a lack of deep customer understanding. Companies often develop products based on their internal beliefs rather than genuine insights into customer needs, resulting in products that flop on the market. Take Google Stadia, Google’s ambitious foray into cloud gaming. Stadia aimed to eliminate the need for expensive gaming hardware, allowing players to stream games directly from the cloud. But while Google's technology was impressive, it misunderstood gamers' needs. Gamers weren’t ready to embrace a platform that left them without game ownership, offered a limited library, and presented pricing models that simply didn’t align with market expectations. Despite Google's dominance in tech infrastructure, Stadia failed because it didn’t address key pain points or anticipate the value that users placed on traditional aspects of gaming.
Similarly, Coca-Cola’s infamous 1985 launch of New Coke misread customer loyalty, assuming that consumers wanted a sweeter soda to compete with Pepsi. The market backlash was swift and harsh, with customers decrying the loss of the original formula they were emotionally attached to. Coca-Cola quickly retreated, realizing too late that it had overlooked the importance of customer sentiment in its innovation thesis.
Sins of Process: Mismanaged Development and Risk Assessment
Even when companies have a groundbreaking idea, poor execution can turn an innovative concept into a failure. One of the most prominent examples is Amazon’s ill-fated Fire Phone, launched in 2014. The phone’s flashy features, like Dynamic Perspective and Firefly, were meant to revolutionize the smartphone market, but instead, they were seen as gimmicks. Consumers didn't find the features compelling enough to justify the phone's high price, especially in a saturated market dominated by Apple and Android. Worse, Amazon failed to align the Fire Phone with its own brand, which customers associated with value-oriented pricing, and the platform's limited app ecosystem further alienated potential users. The Fire Phone was a prime example of pushing a product to market without validating core assumptions or thoroughly testing customer desirability beforehand.
Risk assessment failures also often sabotage innovation projects. Boeing’s 737 MAX serves as a cautionary tale of how overlooking critical risks can lead to catastrophic consequences. In their rush to compete with Airbus, Boeing introduced the 737 MAX with an automated flight control system (MCAS) that pilots weren’t adequately trained to use. The tragic result was two fatal crashes, which could have been avoided with more thorough testing, transparent communication with pilots, and a culture that prioritized safety over speed to market. Boeing underestimated the complexity of integrating the new system and failed to assess the full extent of risks, ultimately damaging its reputation and leading to a worldwide grounding of the aircraft.
Sins of Alignment and Culture: Strategic Confusion and Poor Communication
Misalignment between innovation initiatives and broader business strategies is another fatal flaw. CNN+ is a recent example of a service that failed to fit strategically within its parent company’s goals. Launched in 2022, CNN+ aimed to leverage CNN’s brand in a standalone paid streaming service, but the timing couldn’t have been worse. With Warner Bros. Discovery undergoing a merger, the streaming service lacked strategic clarity and failed to attract enough paying customers. It also didn’t differentiate sufficiently from CNN’s free offerings. This disconnection between CNN’s strategic vision and its new venture led to the platform’s quick demise, underscoring the importance of ensuring that innovation aligns with overall business goals and customer expectations.
Cultural issues often compound these strategic misalignments. Microsoft’s smartphone efforts, including its Windows Phone operating system, were hampered by inconsistent leadership and fluctuating strategies. As Microsoft tried to catch up with Apple and Android, it repeatedly shifted focus between target markets and operating systems, confusing both developers and consumers. Frequent changes in leadership—from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella—further eroded a coherent vision for the platform. By the time Microsoft narrowed its strategy, it was too late; the market had moved on, leaving Windows Phone in the dust.
Perhaps even more damaging than misalignment is poor internal communication, where key issues are not effectively conveyed across an organization. This was tragically evident in the Boeing 737 MAX case, where internal concerns about the safety of the MCAS system were not adequately communicated to decision-makers. The resulting communication breakdown prevented timely interventions that could have saved lives. A similarly devastating example of poor communication can be found in the 1986 Challenger disaster, where engineers’ warnings about the O-ring’s performance in cold weather never reached NASA’s top decision-makers, leading to a catastrophic failure during launch. In both cases, a lack of transparent, cross-departmental communication contributed to tragic outcomes that could have been avoided with better alignment and open channels for reporting risks.
The Eleven Deadly Sins
Here is the list of the Eleven Deadly Sins, grouped by category:
SINS OF INPUTS
1. Poor Customer Understanding: Failure to deeply understand customer needs, pain points, and context leads to innovations that don’t address real problems.
2. Poor Strategic Alignment: Innovation efforts lack alignment with the company's strategic objectives, leading to scattered and ineffective initiatives.
SINS OF PROCESS
3. Inconsistent Approach: Lack of consistent methods for ideation, prototyping, and risk assessment results in difficulty comparing and prioritizing initiatives.
4. Poor Concept Development: Insufficient development of ideas that don’t align with business goals or customer needs increases the likelihood of failure.
5. Poor Assumption Recognition: Critical assumptions go untested, causing flawed premises to persist and lead to project failure.
6. Poor Risk Assessment: Failure to assess potential risks properly results in underestimating threats that could derail innovation projects.
7. Lack of De-Risking: No structured process exists to prioritize risks, test assumptions, or reduce uncertainty, increasing the potential for failure.
SINS OF CULTURE AND ALIGNMENT
8. Poor Internal Communication: Inadequate communication of innovation project value prevents alignment and resource support from stakeholders.
9. Poor Innovation Habits: Decision-making is driven by hierarchy, compromise, or hesitation rather than experimentation and data-driven approaches.
10. Poor/No Training: Lack of training in critical innovation skills like design thinking, rapid prototyping, and hypothesis testing impedes effective contribution.
11. Poor/Lack of Tools:Without adequate systems for tracking ideas, risks, and value creation, innovation portfolios become unmanageable, and productivity falters.
Learning from the Eleven Deadly Sins
The eleven deadly sins of innovation are not exclusive to one company or industry; they are widespread and can affect even the most successful businesses if left unchecked. Whether it’s misunderstanding customer needs, failing to properly test assumptions, or misaligning innovation efforts with broader business strategies, these sins can undermine even the boldest initiatives.
The case studies of Google Stadia, New Coke, the Boeing 737 MAX, and others remind us that successful innovation isn’t just about having a great idea — it’s about understanding customers, managing risks, and fostering a culture that supports thoughtful, strategic execution. By learning from these failures, companies can chart a smarter course as they strategize, grow, and innovate.
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