Failures in Innovation: The 3 Fits

Today I spoke with a product leader who specializes in innovation, Marie-Ange Eyoum Tagne. Marie-Ange is one of those natural innovators who thinks big and pushes boundaries. I was interviewing her about failures to innovate. We kept coming back to there core concepts of fit.

Together, we realized when talking about failures of innovations, they typically come in three categories:

• Company Fit

• Market Fit

• Technology Fit

During our interview, I had the pleasure of learning about her failure to launch an identity product because she was basically ahead of the company, market, and technology. It was over a decade since she failed to bring the idea to market. Now, the company she was at owns the space, and everyone is using the same technologies she advocated for. But 15+ years ago, the company, market, and technology were not ready for her innovation.

In this article, I want to dive into each of these three points of failure for innovators.

Company Fit

Some like to call it the “right to win” issue. Some ideas a better executed in different companies. In Marie-Ange’s case, she had a great idea for an identity product while working in a security product that wasn’t ready to tackle identity issues. Yes, she was ahead of the curve. Maybe in a different company, it would have been better received.

For example, maybe Google Glass would have been less creepy if launched by a company focused on helping the blind navigate the world, not Google who tries to make all the world’s information accessible and useful.

Market Fit

We could also call this one User fit. If you have identified a user, but there are fewer users than you expect that need the product, you may fail. Maybe you have the wrong set of users in mind. Maybe you don’t fully understand the user’s true problem. I am calling all of these market fit problems. Look at the write-ups on the hundreds of startups that pivot after getting their product into the market.

Look at YouTube started as a dating site, Instagram started as a checking product, Shopify sold secondhand snowboards, Pinterest was focused on price-tracking, Android started with cameras, Groupon was about activism (interesting infographic here). Lenny Rachitsky has looked at both B2C and B2B companies that pivoted.

Technology Fit

This is a timely topic. With all the AI and GenAI hype, startups are trying the world over to solve problems and falling flat because the technology still can’t stop hallucinating. In Marie-Ange’s case, the technology included hardware that wasn’t accurate enough for a consumer-focused product. After all, in the consumer world accuracy is expected. Only the most cutting-edge of early adopters would even consider mid-level accuracy. And that is not enough to bet your business on.

Next time you think about when you pushed the envelope on technology and it failed, which of the three categories was most impactful, or was it a perfect storm of all three?