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I Evaluated over 30000 Innovation Ideas at HP

I Evaluated over 30000 Innovation Ideas at HP

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 Your best innovation ideas aren't losing to bad ideas – they're losing to exhaustion. I know that sounds counterintuitive. After 30 years of making billion-dollar innovation decisions at HP and CableLabs, I thought I understood why good ideas failed. Market timing. Technical challenges. Resource constraints. Sometimes that was the case … but most of the time, I was wrong. We've created an innovation economy that's too innovative to innovate. And if you're wondering why your breakthrough ideas keep getting ignored, dismissed, or tabled "for later review," this video will show you the real reason. I'm going to reveal why even brilliant ideas are dying from attention scarcity, not their merit. And why this crisis will determine which companies dominate the next decade. Monday, I shared the complete story in my Studio Notes newsletter about how I first discovered this crisis at HP. For a comprehensive analysis and its implications for your company, please visit the link below. In this episode, I will share with you a practical framework for recognizing and addressing this problem within your organization. The Innovation Overload Problem Let's start with the math that's breaking everyone's brain. Every C-suite leader I know is evaluating 40+ innovation proposals monthly. That's what they tell me when I ask why good ideas are getting ignored—two per business day, every day, without break. However, what's happening psychologically is that decision-makers are developing reflexive skepticism toward all innovation claims as a survival mechanism. It's not cynicism – it's cognitive self-defense against proposal overload. In conversations with dozens of executives over the past year, nearly three-quarters tell me "innovation fatigue" has become their top decision challenge. Think about that. The problem isn't a lack of innovation. The problem is too much innovation. Good ideas are dying not from merit evaluation but from attention competition. We've created an innovation economy where the sheer volume of innovation prevents genuine innovation from emerging. And here's the irony – I'm using the same overloaded language that's part of the problem. When every idea is described as “revolutionary”, the words lose all meaning. Last month alone, I was pitched 23 "revolutionary" AI solutions. Most were solid ideas with real potential. But none got the attention they deserved because my brain had already tagged them as "more innovation noise" before I could properly evaluate their merit. And that's when it hit me: if someone whose job is literally to analyze innovation decisions can't focus properly, what chance do overwhelmed executives have? The cruel mathematics are simple: breakthrough ideas need deep consideration, but executives only have bandwidth for surface-level evaluation. Let me show you exactly how this plays out in the real world. Case Study: HP's Innovation Program Office I first discovered this crisis when I was running HP's Innovation Program Office – what we called the IPO. The IPO was HP's dedicated engine for identifying, incubating, and launching breakthrough technologies that would become the company's future growth drivers. We had frameworks, funding, and brilliant people. Harvard and Stanford now teach case studies about the HP IPO and our process design. But here's what those case studies miss entirely: we were drowning. The HP Innovation Program Office received more than 3,000 ideas and pitches every year. Think about that number. That's nearly 60 new innovation opportunities hitting our desk every week. Each claiming to be a breakthrough. Each demanding evaluation. Each potentially containing the next billion-dollar opportunity for HP. No team – no matter how smart, no matter how well-resourced – can properly evaluate 3,000 innovation ideas annually. The mathematics are impossible. Fatigue became our constant battle. We would clear 50 proposals in one week, only to find 65 new ones waiting the next. It felt like trying to empty an ocean with a bucket. We built sophisticated tools. We created evaluation frameworks. We hired brilliant people and trained them extensively. But underneath all our sophisticated processes was a gnawing feeling that haunted every decision: somewhere in those 3,000 ideas were genuine breakthroughs that we weren't giving proper attention. I remember one particularly brutal month when we evaluated around 250 innovation pitches. By week three, I caught myself skimming proposals that deserved hours of consideration. By week four, 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. The most painful part? Years later, I would occasionally encounter innovations in the market that looked suspiciously familiar. Ideas that had been buried in our pipeline, dismissed ...
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