Innovation’s Biggest Killer: What Really Stops Good Ideas Becoming Great Products
When Anthony Fletcher asked a room of founders to share their biggest innovation failures, the honesty was immediate. One invested in a candle range after franchisee feedback, bought enormous stock, and watched it sit untouched. Another rushed Wellington boots to market and ended up with literal holes in the product.
But the most revealing failure came from Anthony himself: innocent drinks‘ move into orange juice in 2008.
“It sold like broken legs,” Anthony admitted. The product bombed spectacularly. Yet today, innocent sells nearly half a billion pounds worth of orange juice annually. The reason it failed? Customers couldn’t see the orange colour through the Tetra Pak packaging. They thought it was a smoothie and walked past. The solution was absurdly simple: put it in a clear bottle.
This gap between what founders assume and what customers actually do runs through everything Anthony learned at innocent and later as CEO of graze, then Believe in Science. In a virtual workshop for All Together members, he unpacked why most innovation efforts quietly stall.
The Problem with Asking Customers
Anthony’s conclusion after watching innocent’s research budget explode post-Coca-Cola acquisition: expensive market research made absolutely no difference to innovation success rates.
His alternative became brutally simple: send someone to a Tesco in the Midlands at 2pm on a Tuesday and watch real shoppers in their natural habitat. “They’re so disinterested that you’ve got to work even harder to get their attention. It’s the harshest test there is.”
This thinking shaped Graze’s entire American launch. Zero market research. Instead, they shipped products from the UK and treated the first 200 customers as live testing. Over six months, they corrected everything in real time. It worked because they were testing the entire customer experience, not asking hypothetical questions in focus groups.
Timing Matters More Than Product
Real consumer feedback only works if consumers are ready for what you’re selling.
One founder in the room had launched the world’s first high-protein ice cream years before protein became mainstream. Customers had no idea what protein was beyond bodybuilding supplements. Four years later, the category exploded.
Anthony referenced Vita Coco as the counter-example: a brand that spent five years educating people about hydration before the market caught up. “That requires real commitment. Most businesses prefer innovations consumers immediately understand.”
The question becomes: can you afford to wait five years, or do you need wins now?
The Art of Knowing When to Quit
This leads to the hardest question: when do you kill something before it drains your resources?
Anthony’s answer challenges conventional wisdom. Don’t put all your energy into one big bet. Run multiple smaller experiments simultaneously.
“It’s very hard to kill innovation if it’s your only project,” he explained. “You’ll keep pushing because you have nothing else. But if you have three things running, it becomes easy to choose which one’s working.”
Even then, you need patience. With innocent orange juice, it took a full year before they identified the real problem. Not the product. Not the marketing. Just the packaging.
“You learn a bit as you develop, then even more when you launch,” Anthony said. “The trick is staying curious about why something isn’t working rather than declaring it a failure.”
Protecting Innovation from Your Own Processes
As businesses grow, experimental mindsets become harder to maintain. The systems that make a business stable also kill the speed innovation requires.
Anthony’s solution: create a skunkworks team. Take three or four entrepreneurial people from different functions, clear 50% of their workload, and give them something impossible to achieve in eight weeks. Let them ignore normal processes.
“I’ve seen incredible innovations move incredibly fast this way,” he said. “Then you bring it back once it’s proven.”
One founder shared their version: they turned the CEO’s office into an “incubator lab” where normal rules didn’t apply. “The speed and quality of ideas that came out was remarkable.”
The Brutal Truth
What emerged in this workshop wasn’t a formula for guaranteed success. Instead, Anthony offered something more honest: innovation requires too many things to align simultaneously. Market timing. Product quality. Customer readiness. Retailer buy-in. Pricing. Any single factor can kill even the best idea.
“You end up with innovations that have different problems,” Anthony concluded. “The skill is choosing which problems you’d rather solve instead of ending up with nothing.”
For the founders in the room, this reframed the challenge. Innovation isn’t about avoiding failure or finding the perfect idea. It’s about running enough experiments that when something catches, you recognise it fast and double down hard.
Sometimes that means five years of patient education. Sometimes it means 200 guinea pig customers. And sometimes it’s as simple as putting orange juice in a clear bottle so people can see what they’re buying.
The founders who succeed aren’t the ones who avoid mistakes. They’re the ones who learn from them faster than their competitors.
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A huge thank you to Anthony for hosting this session and sharing his insights on innovation. If more workshops like these, or 1-2-1 sessions with Anthony might benefit your business, click here to find out more about our memberships and sign up to join the UK’s most accessible network for founders and CEOs.
