When a CEO announces a major initiative to foster innovation, mark your calendar. Three years later, many of these ambitious ventures will have quietly expired without an obituary. Among those that have met that fate in recent months are initiatives at Target, Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola, the New York Times, and Chubb.
The problem isn’t that large companies lack good ideas. In most cases we’ve studied at Innovation Leader, an online resource for people responsible for innovation and R&D, there’s a surplus of good ideas for new products, services and business models. Often, there is early data that shows customers are willing to buy.
