Innovation isn't broken. Your innovation engine is.

Why the problem is rarely the ideas, and almost always how they're managed.

In the last post, I set out the headline problem. In-market failure rates for innovation have sat between 80% and 95% for three decades, largely untouched by the money and resource businesses have thrown at the discipline. That figure alone should be enough to change how organisations approach innovation. Mostly, it isn't.

What tends to happen instead is predictable. Performance dips, confidence drops, and the response is to go back to the front end. More ideation sessions. More workshops. A refreshed innovation framework. Sometimes a new hire with "disruption" somewhere in their job title. The assumption underneath all of this is the same: if outcomes are poor, the ideas must be the problem.

In our experience, they rarely are.

The wrong diagnosis

Ideas are the easiest place to point the finger, because they're visible. A launch fails, and it's simple to conclude the concept wasn't strong enough, the insight wasn't sharp enough, or the team wasn't creative enough. Budget and talent get blamed next. Rarely does the review turn inward, to the system that decided which ideas got backed, how much support they received, and when that support was withdrawn.

That system is what we call the innovation engine. And it's almost always where the real problem sits.

What the innovation engine actually is

The innovation engine is everything that happens before and after the inception of a new idea. How it's prioritised. How it's resourced. How it's governed through gates and reviews. How success is measured, and over what timeframe. Get the ideas right but leave the engine broken, and the outcome doesn't change. Good ideas go into the same system that has been failing ideas for years, and the system does what it always does.

Three failure patterns we see repeatedly

Across large FMCG portfolios, the same patterns show up again and again, regardless of category or geography.

Pipeline bloat. Too many small projects running at once, each one under-resourced because attention is spread too thin to give any single idea a fair chance. Volume gets mistaken for ambition.

Gate dysfunction. Stage gates that were designed to kill weak ideas early instead function as sell meetings, where the goal becomes getting through the gate rather than testing whether the idea deserves to survive. Few projects die when they should.

Misaligned metrics. Teams are measured on activity, on the number of launches, the pipeline value, the projects shipped, rather than on in-market performance. What gets measured gets managed, and if the measure is wrong, so is the behaviour it drives.

None of these are talent problems. They're system problems, and they compound quietly over years until they're simply accepted as how innovation works here.

What a well-tuned engine looks like

Organisations that get this right tend to run fewer bets, not more. Each one properly resourced, with clear ownership and enough runway to actually prove or disprove itself. Gates that are genuinely willing to say no. Metrics that track what happens after launch, not just before it. None of this requires a bigger team or a bigger budget. It requires a system that's been correctly diagnosed and deliberately tuned.

Minor adjustments, material impact

This is the core of our Innovation Engine Remap approach. We rarely find that a client's innovation function needs tearing down and rebuilding. What we find, consistently, is a small number of specific interventions, correctly targeted, that shift outcomes materially. The engine doesn't need reinventing. It needs remapping.

If any of this sounds like your organisation, the starting point isn't another ideation sprint. It's a short diagnostic conversation about how your innovation engine is actually performing. Get in touch, and let's find out what's really going on under the bonnet.

Justin Wright

Managing Partner

Mangrove