You hear the term “innovation” tossed around a lot in the corporate world these days. Everyone is looking for the next innovative product, marketing strategy, or “big idea” to stay ahead of their competition. Regardless of the industry you are in it is important to be innovative and stay ahead of the curve, so your brand does not become stagnant in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

The problem is that all too often the corporate or company culture actually stifles innovation before it can get started. Jeffery Phillips examines some weak links in the innovation chain that lead to failure, in his article, “Innovation Failure Points: Strangled in the Crib.”

In his article Phillips touches on five key innovation killers within organizations including: not having the fortitude, unclear goals, and being scared of change. Too often companies are afraid to take the plunge and make the commitment and investment to achieve a successful innovation.

While working as a product manager in the sporting goods industry for many years I saw first hand the importance of innovation and the effect it can have on a company. It was imperative that we continually innovate and it was my job to research the marketplace to find the next innovative product or “big idea.” It was a constant battle to develop the next home run product because if we didn’t innovate someone else would and our company would be passed by.

During this time I experienced some of the roadblocks that were discussed in Phillips article. Before moving forward, commitment and investment had to be made to the idea on the front end, which proved difficult because many times we were too afraid to rock the boat and possibly disrupting the current business we had. This worked for maintaining our current market share in the short term, but it also limited our ability to grow and be prepared for the future.

Phillips makes an additional important point that we usually only hear about the successful innovations when there is still a lot we can learn from innovation “failures.” By investigating the points that caused the innovation fail we are better able to prepare ourselves for future success. According to Phillips:

“I believe it is more interesting and more informative to consider the failures rather than the successes, in that every failure is instructive, while most successes are situational.

So rather than looking at a successful result and assuming the process was valid, let's consider innovation as a series of interconnected links, and find the likely failure points for innovation in that chain. As we look at weak links in the innovaion chain our first stop is at the beginning."

At Plexipixel, we work hard to avoid roadblocks to innovation by fostering a creative environment. With constantly evolving digital world it is also imperative for the success of our client’s initiatives that we stay on top of new technologies. We have always tried hard to push the boundaries of innovation beginning with co-founder Matt Tamaru being one of the first animators/designers to formulate a production process using FutureSplash (later renamed Flash), to our recent work with Silverlight technologies and the development of our proprietary Windows Azure CMS..

It’s been refreshing as well as challenging to be at a company that understands the difficulties involved in fostering creative ideas and successful innovations.  The challenging part is that we know that we can only work on moving forward by talking about our successes as well as failures.  An essential part of my job at Plexipixel is to help facilitate that same environment with our clients which means I have to talk about success and failures including our very own.

All in all, I’ve learned that innovation can indeed be difficult but perhaps not in the way I’ve always assumed; good ideas can come from anywhere, but great ideas are the ones that are nurtured to completion with a lot of honesty and a healthy heaping of humble pie.