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Why Great Ideas Fail

I ran a session at FOO camp on Why Great Ideas Fail. The goal was to leave the room with a list of reasons and here it is.

The crowd was tech/start-up folks and the list is shifted towards those pursuits. Fascinating how many of these are opposite pairs of each other (e.g. gave up too soon vs.stayed with same idea for too long).

Why Great Ideas Fail:

  • Killed idea too soon
  • Launched idea too early or too late
  • Death (of person with the idea)
  • Someone got their first and stayed in front
  • Not willing to experiment to find audience
  • Unwilling to change direction
  • Willful ignorance of economics
  • Not knowing target audience
  • Unable to overcoming organizational inertia
  • Not understanding the ecosystem the idea lives in
  • Inability to learn from microfailure
  • Fighting the last war
  • Stayed with idea for too long
  • Giving up
  • Chindogu – solution causes more problems than it solves
  • Factors beyond anyone’s control (market, wars, competitors, natural disasters, etc.)
  • Failed to pitch or communicate well
  • Underestimated marketing
  • Not taking the idea far enough
  • Taking the idea too far too early
  • Underestimating cultural limits
  • Underestimating dependencies
  • Failure to balance  how world is vs. how world can be
  • Failure to balance wants vs needs

Thanks to Val Aurora, I also got a list from attendees of personal reasons great ideas failed. Wide range of levels of specificity, but still interesting,

Specific failures people listed as their own:

  • Forcing something on people they don’t want
  • Not controlling distribution (e.g. Tivo vs. Comcast DVR)
  • Not doing post-mortems
  • Not eating our own dogfood
  • Building something ‘powerful’ but too complicate for the average user
  • Force change earlier. It won’t happen on its own.
  • Launching a product before it’s ready – unreliable performance
  • Not killing a project/startup faster (i.e. spinning wheels for an extra year instead of getting it out the door)
  • Trusting before researching
  • Not trusting my gut
  • Not considering political capital within a large organization
  • Trusting my gut too much
  • Juggling between being your greatest supporter and your greatest critic
  • Voice version of twitter circa 2005
  • Built an Airbnb before Airbnb, but didn’t see it through

Thanks to @jessykate for the photo of the whiteboard, from which these notes were transcribed.