Top 5 Innovation Killers - #1

#1: An intolerance of failure. The #1 top tactic for innovation, according to expert innovators, is to ‘experiment fearlessly’. Nothing works first time, so you may as well get it wrong as soon as you can. If you cannot accept failure you are unlikely to see too much innovation, no matter how much money you throw at it.

General Mills Analysis -- simply put, we are not currently set up to 'experiment fearlessly'. We don't have a mindset nor a structure that supports true incubation. Furthermore, when truly transformational opportunities are pursued within our operating division construct, they are somewhat doomed the start, as they are held to the standards of the Division New Product launch hurdles, which have been developed based upon the categories in which we ALREADY compete. As a result, the chances of emerging opportunities (which often have lower volumes and potentially lower margins at first) meeting these hurdles are very slim. We definitely have pockets of disruptive thinking in the organization.....now is the time to put it all together and create the structure and processes required to truly incubate ideas that will ultimately either go away or achieve enough scale to be incorporated into the broader matrix.

Consumers -- will they exist 20 years from now??

The term 'consumer' is such an ingrained part of our culture. There's even an entire industry built around that term -- Consumer Packaged Goods. Yet, the term consumer implies certain behaviors that may not be as relevant down the road. Even though 'consumers' today have much more of a voice than ever in the past, there is still a fairly one-way relationship between the vast majority of manufacturers and these 'consumers'......at a simplistic level, manufacturers make something (yes, with some input from consumers), they tell consumers about it, they make it available, they tell people about it with the hopes that these people will 'consume' it, purchase it again, and tell others about it.

'Consumer' is inherently a passive concept. We talk about getting closer to the consumer, but at the end of day, we (the manufacturer) make the call on what is made and where and when we will make it available (assuming the retailer wants the product).

As society gets more and more comfortable with instant information and instant gratification, what happens to this traditional CPG model? What happens if consumers, not manufacturers, are truly calling the shots and are at the center of the business transaction? Will the term 'consumer' even be relevant? And, as a result, will the Consumer Packaged Goods industry even exist years from now?