Innovation is a risky and uncertain process even for the largest of corporations. The marketplace is littered with innovations that fell by the wayside, sometimes in a wave of bad publicity. Most notorious in my mind is the demise of new Coke in 1985 when the Coca-Cola Company attempted to replace the original formula of its flagship soft drink. The new cola was a major marketing disaster. The latest in a long line of market failures was signalled this week when Google announced on its official blog that it has decided to pull the plug on Wave, its web application for real-time communication and collaboration, just a year after its launch. Wave has simply not seen the user adoption rates Google required.
However, writing in his blog for the Harvard Business Review, Karim R. Lakhani, argues that Google made “exactly the right move and provides some very important lessons for managing innovation in both small and large organizations.” He adds:
