After three decades of evaluating over 30,000 innovation ideas at HP and CableLabs, I discovered something that completely changed how I think about innovation failure. Your breakthrough ideas aren't losing to better ideas—they're losing to exhaustion. In my latest YouTube video, I share the uncomfortable truth that's killing innovation in companies worldwide: we've created an innovation economy that's too innovative to innovate.
The math hit me like a brick wall. When I was running HP's Innovation Program Office, we were processing over 3,000 ideas annually—that's nearly 60 new innovation opportunities hitting our desk every week. Each claimed to be a breakthrough. Each demanded evaluation. Each potentially contained the next billion-dollar opportunity for HP. Despite our sophisticated frameworks and brilliant people, I realized we were systematically filtering out the very breakthroughs we were designed to find. Not because the ideas lacked merit, but because human attention has limits no framework can overcome.
What haunts me most is remembering how I caught myself skimming proposals that deserved hours of consideration. By week four of particularly brutal months, I was unconsciously looking for reasons to say no rather than reasons to say yes. That's when I realized the system had broken me—and if it could break someone whose job was literally to find breakthrough innovation, it was breaking everyone.
Through my analysis, I've identified three distinct types of innovation fatigue destroying breakthrough potential: executive fatigue (reflexive skepticism toward ALL pitches), team fatigue (innovators burning out from launching initiatives that get ignored), and market fatigue (customers becoming immune to "revolutionary" claims).
Watch my full video where I share my practical five-step framework for conducting an "attention audit" and building the decision infrastructure that separates companies that dominate from those that remain overwhelmed.
For my complete analysis—including the painful case studies I couldn't share publicly and deeper insights from my 30,000 failed evaluations—I've written a comprehensive deep-dive in my Studio Notes on Substack. The companies that master innovation decisions while their competitors drown in opportunity abundance will write the next chapter of business history. Which chapter will yours write?