Big Companies Good at Innovation are Rarities

Practitioners of innovation almost always believe their chances of succeeding are quite high. They would not make the effort unless they did believe that was the case. But, statistically, innovation tends to be quite hard. Consider venture capital, which is innovation with clear or+metrics for success

A general rule of thumb for venture capitalists is that 75 percent of venture capital startups fail completely. Another three or four return the original investment, and one or two produce virtually all the significant financial returns. 

Also, keep in mind that perhaps one percent of proposals actually wind up getting funding. 

According to Cambridge Associates. Information technology digital media startups from 2001 to 2011 produced uneven multiples of the original investment. In more than 60 percent of cases, the startups did not earn enough to produce a return on invested  capital. About seven percent of all funded companies are able to produce returns in excess of five times the original investment. 

source: jtangoVC 

So outright failure is the case at least 63 percent of the time. Another 30 percent produce an actual return. Less than one in ten are big winners. 

Some studies suggest 74 percent of digital transformation efforts fail. Historically, most big information technology projects fail. BCG research suggests that 70 percent of digital transformations fall short of their objectives. 

From 2003 to 2012, only 6.4 percent of federal IT projects with $10 million or more in labor costs were successful, according to a study by Standish, noted by Brookings. IT project success rates range between 28 percent and 30 percent, Standish also notes. The World Bank has estimated that large-scale information and communication projects (each worth over U.S. $6 million) fail or partially fail at a rate of 71 percent. 

McKinsey says that big IT projects also often run over budget. Roughly half of all large IT projects—defined as those with initial price tags exceeding $15 million—run over budget. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and seven percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted, McKinsey says. 

Beyond IT, virtually all efforts at organizational change arguably also fail. The rule of thumb is that 70 percent of organizational change programs fail, in part or completely. 

Of the $1.3 trillion that was spent on digital transformation--using digital technologies to create new or modify existing business processes--in 2018, it is estimated that $900 billion went to waste , say Ed Lam, Li & Fung CFO, Kirk Girard, former Director of Planning and Development in Santa Clara County and Vernon Irvin Lumen Technologies president of Government, Education, and Mid & Small Business. 

All that accumulated experience helps us understand why innovation so often comes from the young, who have less to lose; from small firms rather than big, established firms; from outside an industry rather than from within it. 

A rational actor in any large, established industry or firm has more to lose than to gain from an attempt at innovation: odds of success are three in 10. A small attacker might well conclude that those odds are worth the effort, especially if the attacker is led by young people who can survive an early failure or two with little long-term damage. 

Quite the opposite is true for older leaders who have risen to the top precisely because they know how the legacy business runs, and benefit from it. A professional manager who expects to remain in the top post for less than a decade has much more to lose than to gain by any serious effort to transform the existing business model. 

When the person at the top of any big organization is three to five years away from retirement, what else would you expect, other than behavior that is basically “do not mess it up?” 

The upshot is that innovation is risky, destined to fail seven times out of 10. “Letting someone else take the risk of attempting innovation” therefore can appear a wise strategy. The exceptions often occur when a firm’s core business model is unraveling. Then the risk of trying to innovate is less than the risk of staying a failing course. 

There seems to be far less research done on how successful firms are at rescuing themselves from failing business models. Impressionistically, the odds are even worse than seven out of 10, as the common remedy is a sale of the asset to some other entity, assuming outright bankruptcy is avoided.