Why Innovation So Often Fails (and Occasionally Works)
My few observations from 15 years inside the machine
The innovation sector is a curious beast. It's vast and seductive — a glittering promise of transformation, impact, and glory. Countless individuals and institutions march into it with big ambitions. Yet few emerge with real success.
So what’s going wrong?
The Illusion of Institutional Innovation
We’ve built entire ecosystems — think tanks, accelerators, government agencies, EU backed institutions — with the express mission of fostering innovation. But more often than not, these institutions don’t actually deliver it.
The problem is simple: misaligned incentives.
We reward visibility over value. Activity over outcomes. “Promoting innovation” becomes a goal in itself. Metrics like media mentions, panel appearances, and program participation replace the hard stuff — like building something people actually want, at scale.
As a result, these organizations often attract average teams, optimized for bureaucracy, not brilliance. Mastery doesn’t live here. Motion does.
Why Incubation Rarely Works
Incubators, accelerators, venture builders — they’ve become standard fixtures in the innovation landscape. And yet, they rarely work either.
Why?
Because their real goals usually aren’t about building great new ventures. Instead, they serve other masters: improving an existing brand’s reputation, signaling innovation to shareholders, impressing a board, or just polishing a LinkedIn profile.
On a personal level, motivations often skew toward ego, short-term wins, and career optics. Meanwhile, the actual outcome — whether the startup succeeds or fails — doesn’t much affect the people running the show. They’re not held accountable. Their salaries are safe. Everyone knows “startups are risky,” right?
ANd Yet Sometimes it does
Innovation can thrive when:
There is real skin in the game: carry, equity, meaningful upside.
There is no secondary agenda — no one to impress, no brand to protect.
Talented people are at the helm.
In those rare cases, magic happens. Talent + aligned incentives + freedom = a fighting chance.
Roles No One Asks For
Innovation often casts people into roles they didn’t choose: the architect, the bureaucrat, the politician, the grumpy old engineer. Work that’s labeled “innovation” often turns out to be administrative or political — it just happens to take place in a tech setting.
These players frequently extract more than they contribute. Still, they control budgets. They can, sometimes, be helpful.
The Community Mirage
Everyone wants to “build community.” Events, programs, meetups, Slack groups… most of it doesn’t work.
Finding something that truly connects people is hard. Keeping it working as it scales is harder. The best communities are usually exclusive, a little clubby, sometimes even pretentious. But they’re tight-knit. That’s what keeps them alive.
In Conclusion
Innovation isn’t what it looks like from the outside. It’s not all pitch decks and unicorns and rocket emojis. It’s messy, human, political, often frustrating — and occasionally glorious.
When it works, it’s because the right people are free to do the right work, for the right reasons.
And when it doesn’t?
Well… the incentives probably told a different story.
