top 10 reasons why ideas fail

Only one in ten new products succeed. That’s only a 10% success rate! What if only 10% of the hires you made worked out? What if your financial reports were only accurate 10% of the time? What if your local pizza joint only got your pizza right 10% of the time? You’d find a different place to buy a pizza wouldn’t you? Nine out of ten new products fail because the ideation process that the majority of companies and organizations use is broken.

In their book, “Lightning in a Bottle: The Proven System to Create New Ideas and Products that Work,” authors David Minter and Michael Reid detail why current ideation tools fail and provide a proven 7 step system that you can follow to better ideas. Below are the top 10 reasons they’ve identified why most ideas fail:

1. Trying to sell things people don’t want to buy

2. The ideas don’t make financial sense

3. Giving up too soon on good ideas

4. Pushing bad ideas too long

5. No separation of good ideas from bad

6. Thinking small

7. Delegating idea development to junior people

8. No specialized talent for developing ideas

9. No process, or a poor process, for developing ideas

10. No real, important difference verses competition