When organizations innovate, the expectations are often tremendous. Significant financial success. Rapid adoption. Market disruption.
What if an innovation doesn’t deliver on any of those expectations, though? Does that mean that that innovation is a failure?
The answer is that failing to deliver on typical expectations doesn’t mean an innovation failed. Innovation successes can come in many forms. This is true even when the financial results don’t deliver the expected ROI.
The Wall Street Journal walked past this reality to hammer Amazon’s apparent failure in physical stores. Despite Amazon Go stores not taking off at the rate that they could have, the company successfully developed and commercialized its Just Walk Out technology. It’s now licensed across industries such as sports venues, airports, healthcare facilities, and education.
The lesson? If you define success too narrowly, you will overlook significant innovation wins.
Defining Innovation for Success
Going to school on Amazon, here are credible ways to expand your definition of innovation success.
1) Alternative Revenue Streams – Finding New Financial Gains
Innovation needn’t always deliver a billion-dollar business. Success can look like:
- Developing a component product, service, or
- Technology that can be licensed or repurposed (such as the Amazon Just Walk Out system).
- Establishing a modest but profitable revenue stream, even if it isn’t comparable to other business lines.
- Gaining expertise that can be monetized elsewhere, such as in adjacent industries or partnerships.
2) Expanding Your Brand Identity and Positioning
Innovation can succeed when it strengthens a company’s brand positioning and market influence:
- Broadening consumer perception of what your brand stands for and what it can deliver.
- Creating a market position relative to competitors originating in a different space.
- Gaining a foothold in an emerging market to pave the way for future success.
- Engaging new customer segments looking for different features and benefits.
- Improving customer experience delivery.
3) Gaining Market Understanding and Insights
One of the biggest overlooked innovation wins? Data. Even when an initiative falls short of plan, information gathering can create value through:
- Collecting new customer insights, behavior patterns, and preferences that weren’t visible previously.
- Transforming a behind-the-scenes prototype into a real-world experiment with measurable feedback.
- Testing new technologies or business models in the market rather than through a controlled internal environment.
- Identifying smaller-than-expected advantages that, while not market-disrupting, provide new differentiation.
Rethinking Innovation Success
Defining success too narrowly risks missing the meaningful value in your innovation efforts. While many ideas fail financially, they can open new revenue paths, strengthen brand positioning, and generate critical market insights.
Winning at innovation isn’t just about hitting a home run. Sometimes, success means setting up the next great opportunity.
If you're rethinking how to define and deliver innovation success, Brainzooming can help. We work with organizations to uncover strategic opportunities, reframe innovation challenges, and design more adaptive strategies—so your innovation efforts create value, even when outcomes look different than expected. Whether you're launching new initiatives or reassessing past ones, let’s talk about how to broaden your innovation lens and unlock what’s next. - Mike Brown
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