Why MOST Innovations FAIL: and How You Can Make Innovations Stick

In my conversation on the DoneMaker Podcast with DoneMaker’s host, we dug into the messy truth behind Innovations: why most of them fail, what the real failure modes are, and what you can do differently starting today. You’ll get practical tactics, emotional-first strategies, and examples that range from stand-up comedy to Fortune 500 labs, because innovations are as human as they are technical.

Before you dive in: Innovations aren’t a single eureka moment. They’re a system, a set of behaviors, assumptions, emotional responses, and small daily experiments that, when combined, either produce something new or let it die quietly. If you’re trying to get an innovation out of your head and into the market, these ten lessons will help you see where you’re actually stuck and how to move forward.

1. Treat Innovations as an Operating System, not a One-Off

You can’t rely on one brilliant brainstorm and hope it becomes a game-changer. Innovations succeed when you build repeatable processes for exploration, connection, and iteration. I call this an “innovation operating system.” That system includes how you organize teams, how you run brainstorms, how you budget for experiments, and how you collect signals from the market.

When you think of Innovations as an OS, you start to polish individual gears, the leadership rituals, the experiment cadence, the communication flow — and the entire machine changes. That tiny weekly sync (or the pizza in the cafeteria) can break silos and create a continuous flow of novel ideas. You don’t need to overhaul everything at once: start by improving one gear and you’ll feel the momentum to handle more.

“If you can innovate one piece of the operating system, you start to feel freedom to do it elsewhere.”

2. Breaking “Good Habits” Is Hard: and Necessary for Real Growth

Large organizations succeed by optimizing for repeatability. That’s why “good habits” are so entrenched: they keep the lights on and stakeholders happy. But those same habits make introducing brand-new Innovations painful. Your product teams, legal, sales, and operations are wired to deliver the known product — not to take bets on undefined futures.

If you want to create a new product, service, or customer experience, you’ll need to intentionally break the good habits that got you here. That means creating protected spaces for experimentation, redefining success metrics during pilots, and allowing teams to fail safely without jeopardizing the core business. In other words, build a lab with its own rules so it can behave differently.

3. Small Teams Often Struggle Because They Treat Innovation Like a Formula

Smaller companies must be innovative to survive. Ironically, many young teams turn innovation into a rigid step-by-step formula — step one, step two, step three — and then get frustrated when reality doesn’t follow the process map. You need a methodology, yes, but it must include permission to deviate, to explore, and to keep failing forward.

For your Innovations to thrive in a small team environment, carve out a lightweight practice for daily learning. Decide how often you’ll test hypotheses, what documentation you’ll keep, and what the minimum viable experiment looks like. Keep the bureaucracy minimal, but keep the discipline consistent.

4. Budget the Human Side of Experiments: Time, Emotion, and Bandwidth

Many companies treat experimentation as an optional luxury. They don’t account for the emotional and time costs required. Innovation needs a budget — not just for tech or pilots, but also for people: learning time, cross-team conversations, and the mental bandwidth to be curious. If your people are exhausted, you’ll only see half-baked Innovations.

Ask yourself: do you have a time budget for curiosity? Do individual contributors have permission to experiment during their workweek? Without explicit allocation of mental real estate, the default reaction is to prioritize finishing old work over inventing new work. And that kills Innovations.

5. Expect Pivots: Some Will Fail, Some Will Become Zoom

Pivots are the currency of innovation. Sometimes they come from market signals, sometimes from losing a client or a funding source, sometimes from a cultural trend you didn’t expect. Not every pivot survives, remember MySpace vs. Facebook, but some pivots explode into the future (think Zoom in a crisis).

When you see unexpected signals, surprising downloads, geographic spikes, or new user behaviors, dig in. Often the pivot isn’t obvious until you decode why the signal happened. L’Oreal’s AR makeup app had 15 million downloads and a third came from a market the company hadn’t actively targeted. That was a pivot-sized signal. The question for you: do you have the playbook to act when the unexpected turns up?

6. Emotional Grit Often Outweighs the “Golden Idea”

For every visible Innovation there are dozens, sometimes hundreds, of dead versions. You’ll pitch, you’ll be rejected, and you’ll iterate. Visionaries succeed not because they had the perfect initial idea, but because they had emotional resilience to keep showing up. Drake Sutton Shearer pitched his cannabis company 198 times before he saw revenue. That’s not a one-off story, it’s the shape of persistent innovation.

So, you need more than a good deck. You need rituals that build grit: a practice of small failures, debriefs that normalize learning from rejection, and a community that reduces shame around pivoting. If you treat failures as data instead of destiny, your Innovations will outlast the inevitable noise.

7. Most Problems Are People Problems: Fix the Human Friction

“Any problem at any organization is a people problem.” That’s blunt, but it’s true. You can optimize code and tweak an algorithm, but if the person building it feels unseen, underappreciated, or burned out, the outputs will suffer. People choose how much of their capacity they bring to work — not just the skills they possess.

Look beyond process to mood and meaning. Who are you making things for? Who are you making things with? Are you asking what people on the team are learning or feeling? The emotional climate matters. A small HR change, a clearer recognition ritual, or a single conversation can restore several hours of creative energy across your team.

8. Reframe Your Skills: The “Swiss Army Knife” Advantage

When you switch industries or roles, you might feel like an impostor — everyone else has deep domain experience and you don’t. But those outsider skills are powerful. I call them your Swiss Army knife: the abnormal set of cross-disciplinary skills that make you better at connecting dots others don’t see.

If you’re trying to sell Innovations inside a new company or to investors, reframe your background. Don’t apologize for being different — explain why cross-domain perspective is an advantage. Translate your past trades into crisp benefits (e.g., “I engineered transmissions; now I engineer customer journeys that transfer power efficiently”). That language makes your Innovations understandable and fundable.

9. Aim for “Low Bandwidth, High Impact” Experiments

You don’t need grand gestures. Often a single small change drives the outcome far more than a full rewrite. I call this the “low bandwidth, high impact” strategy: find the minimal, least risky experiment that could move the needle and run it.

For example, instead of a six-month platform integration that requires signoff from three committees, test a one-week trial with a founder you know. If it moves the needle, you’ll have qualitative data and advocates to scale. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost a fraction of time and budget but learned something crucial. Put another way: be surgical. Experiments don’t have to be loud to be meaningful.

10. Practice, Center Yourself, and Become Unattached to Outcome

Innovation is emotionally intense. You’ll oscillate between peaks and troughs, and the trap is chasing outcomes as if they’re the measure of your worth. That makes you reactive and churns your energy. The sweet spot is a steady practice: center yourself so you can experiment without catastrophic attachment.

That center looks different for everyone: meditation, tap dancing, running, or any practice that puts you in a neutral mind. When you’re less reactive to outcome, you create better work. You show up more patient in the 198th pitch. You can weather the MySpaces and recognize the potential Zooms.

“I’m unattached to outcome — I’ll try my best and accept whatever happens without dissolving into panic.”

Conclusion — The Real Work Behind Sustainable Innovations

Innovations are not mystical. They’re the product of systems you build, people you support, experiments you run, and the emotional grit you practice. If you want to beat the odds, stop chasing the single golden idea and start building an operating system that makes breakthroughs repeatable.

Here’s a quick checklist to act on today:

• Pick one low-bandwidth, high-impact experiment and run it this week.
• Host one cross-team conversation (pizza, coffee, or 30-minute sync) to break silos.
• Define one emotional capacity ritual for your team (quiet time, check-ins, or a creative practice).
• Translate your transferable skills into benefits on your next pitch deck.
• Document three small failures and the learning you gained from each.

If you want to continue the conversation, reach out. I love talking to teams that are stuck between the now and the next — and I learn a lot from every conversation. Shoot me a note at Densonology at Gmail or find me on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you’re serious about turning your Innovations into something that lasts, start with the human piece and the rest will follow.

Go build, iterate, grieve the failures, celebrate the tiny wins — and remember: Innovations are a practice, not a moment.

Watch the full podcast here: Why MOST Innovations FAIL and What We Can Learn From Them | Chris Denson | DoneMaker Podcast

FAQ — Practical Answers to Your Toughest Innovation Questions