How Companies Can Sustain Innovation Success

Early in my career, I used to make the mistake of simply saying to leaders that their companies needed to become more innovative. And every time I said that, I would get the same kind of push back. The leaders would make reference to one or two innovative products and services they had launched in the last 3–5 years.

But this was not the reaction I meant to trigger. I wasn’t trying to imply that their companies had never launched successful innovations before. What I was trying to say was that they needed to create a process for launching successful innovations over and over again.

The real question with innovation is; can we sustain our initial successes over time?

One Hit Wonders

A perspective that might be helpful in evaluating the success of one-off innovations, is the phenomenon of one-hit wonders in the music industry. Social scientist Justin Berg makes a distinction between artists who are one-hit wonders versus hit makers. His research focuses on how people in creative industries sustain success over time.

In an archival study, Berg evaluated data from over three million songs from 65,050 artists. He evaluated the levels of diversity and creativity in an artist’s portfolio before they have an initial hit song. Then he evaluated whether the artist was able to produce additional hits after that initial success.

Berg found that artists that have diverse and creative portfolios before their first hit, have greater odds of producing additional hits going forward. In other words, having a diverse and creative portfolio provides the artist with the ability to sustain success over time, even as the market changes.

What about artists with less creative portfolios that are typical of current trends? Berg found that these artists were more likely to have an initial hit compared to artists with more diverse and creative portfolios. But this success was short-lived.

After their initial success, artists with less creative portfolios were less likely to produce additional hits going forward. In other words, these types of artists were more likely to end up as one-hit wonders.

Berg’s research presents a dilemma for artists and innovators. Do you optimize your portfolio for likelihood of getting an initial hit or do you optimize your portfolio for sustained success? The research seems to suggest that you can’t have it both ways.

To guarantee success, innovators have to do things that have succeeded in the past, or follow current trends by copying what others are doing.

To sustain success, innovators have to do diverse things that also include creative breakthroughs that are different to what they have done in the past and not simply copy of what others are current doing.

In the language of innovation management, sustained success is the result of a balanced portfolio that covers efficiency, sustaining and transformative innovations.

Efficiency innovation guarantees short term success. However, a diverse and balanced portfolio of bets that includes sustaining and transformative innovations is more likely to produce long term success.

So the question I should have been asking leaders is:

Do you want your company to produce one-hit wonders or consistent hit makers?

— — — — —

Learn more at www.tendayiviki.com.