Posts Tagged As Innovation Development

Nike FuelBand Failure: Innovation Failure Happens – How Will You Respond?

Last Friday CNET reported that Nike had fired a large part of their Digital Sports division, the team responsible for their FuelBand product.  It was estimated that of the 70 person hardware team, 70-80% were let go.  Based on the comments of Nike representatives it sounds as though the company isn’t abandoning the technology altogether but just pivoting away from hardware manufacturing.  With more phones and wearable devices adding the necessary chips to track motion it looks like Nike will pivot to become more of an integrator into other hardware platforms.

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The Fallacy of the Pre-Mortem in Preventing Failure – A Distinction on Avoiding vs. Managing Failures

I will admit that I definitely have earned the moniker of “The Failure Guy” with my incessant ramblings on the topic of failure: our fear of it, the importance of learning from it, and the necessity of preparing for it.  So I wasn’t surprised when a friend had forwarded me a LinkedIn post titled “The PreMortem: Preventing Failure Before You Fail.”  To be honest I had read the article and thought that it sounded quite ridiculous; the idea that we could simply avoid failure by just preparing more for it seemed tragically flawed.  How much preparation would be required to completely prevent failure on a project of any reasonable complexity?

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