10 Innovation Traps & How to Overcome Them
Innovation fuels the engines of progress, separating industry leaders from followers. Yet even companies committed to innovation often find their efforts falling short of expectations.
Often the culprit is not market forces or macroeconomic factors but innovation practice pitfalls that derail promising initiatives. Teams get caught in cycles of groupthink, misinterpret user needs, or become overly attached to early ideas.
We've identified 10 frequent traps in innovation and practical tactics to overcome each:
The Trap:
SOLUTIONISM
Assuming every problem needs a novel solution, rather than considering systemic changes or existing solutions.
The Trick:
REVERSE BRAINSTORMING
Teams identify ways to worsen the problem, revealing underlying systemic issues. This approach leverages the availability heuristic to broaden thinking beyond immediate, novel solutions.
The Trap:
ECHO CHAMBERS
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
The Trap:
EMPATHY-ACTION PARADOX
Becoming paralyzed by an overabundance of user insights, leading to inaction or overly complex solutions.
The Trap:
INNOVATION -TO -IMPLEMENTATION GAP
Focusing solely on ideation and neglecting the challenges of scaling and implementing innovations.
The Trap:
COGNITIVE BIASES
Succumbing to our usual ways of thinking, assumptions, or biases, leading to poor decision-making in the innovation process.
The Trap:
UNTESTED ASSUMPTIONS
Building innovations on a shaky foundation of untested assumptions about users, technology, or market conditions.
The Trap:
INCENTIVE MISALIGNMENT
Rewarding behaviors that don't actually lead to successful innovation (e.g., number of ideas generated rather than impact created).
The Trap:
NOVELTY BIAS
Overvaluing ‘new and flashy’ at the expense of incremental but impactful improvements.
The Trap:
LOCALIZATION OVERSIGHT
Failing to adapt innovations for different markets or contexts, leading to poor adoption.
The Trap:
SHORT-TERM BIAS
Prioritizing quick wins over longer-term, potentially more impactful innovations.
The Trick:
PERSPECTIVE ROTATION
Team members must ‘role play’ and argue from different stakeholder viewpoints. This practice helps team members develop cognitive empathy, challenges assumptions, and uncovers blind spots in the innovation process.
The Trick:
EXTREME USER METHOD
Identify and deeply engage with users at the extremes of your target audience - both power users and those who struggle the most. This approach can reveal unexpected insights and simplify complex user data into actionable direction.
The Trick:
BOOM OR BUST PLANNING
Teams envision potential future states where the innovation has failed or succeeded wildly, then work backwards to identify critical implementation challenges and opportunities. This approach leverages our natural tendency to create narratives, making abstract future challenges more concrete and actionable.
The Trick:
BIAS BOUNTIES
Establish rewards for team members for identifying potential biases in the innovation process. This creates a culture of bias awareness and self-correction.
The Trick:
ASSUMPTION MAPPING
Regularly catalog all assumptions underlying a concept, categorize them by potential impact and degree of uncertainty, and systematically test the most critical ones. This prevents teams from being blindsided by faulty assumptions late in the process.
The Trick:
INNOVATION PEER REVIEWS
Regularly have team members evaluate each other's contributions based on predefined criteria that align with long-term innovation goals. This leverages social proof and peer influence to shape behavior towards more impactful innovation activities.
The Trick:
INVISIBLE HERO FEATURES
Task teams with improving a product or service without changing core features or appearance. This constraint forces focus on non-obvious evolutions that significantly impact performance or user experience. By making these "invisible" improvements tangible and celebrated, teams learn to value impact over flashiness.
The Trick:
CONTEXT SIMULATIONS
Teams interact with the product under diverse simulations, including varied tech infrastructure, regulations, and local challenges using real data. This helps teams innovate for different contexts, making potential implementation hurdles tangible during development.
The Trick:
TEMPORAL PRIMING
Before innovation discussions, have team members engage in exercises that put them in a long-term mindset, such as writing a letter to their future selves or imagining their industry in 20 years. This technique leverages cognitive priming to counteract our natural bias towards immediate rewards.
