I Evaluated Over 30,000 Innovation Ideas at HP: Here’s Why Most Failed

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 not because they lacked merit, but because they arrived during a week when we were too overwhelmed to give them the attention they deserved.

We had built the most sophisticated innovation evaluation process in corporate America, and it was systematically filtering out the very breakthroughs it was designed to find.

Not because our frameworks were wrong, but because human attention has limits that no framework can overcome.

That HP experience taught me to recognize the pattern. Since then, I've worked with dozens of companies facing the same crisis. The scale varies – some see 500 pitches annually, others see 5,000 – but the attention mathematics always break the same way.

The Three Types of Innovation Fatigue

Through analyzing failures across multiple companies, I've identified three distinct types of innovation fatigue destroying breakthrough potential.

Type 1: Executive Innovation Fatigue

The symptom: Senior leaders developing reflexive skepticism toward ALL innovation pitches, regardless of merit.

Here's what's happening: The overpromise/underdeliver cycle has trained executives to expect disappointment from innovation investments. After being burned by “revolutionary” solutions that delivered incremental improvements, leaders develop cognitive firewalls against innovation enthusiasm.

I recently spoke with a Fortune 500 CEO who instituted a company-wide moratorium: “No more innovation pitch meetings for six months. We're drowning in breakthrough promises and starving for actual execution.”

This wasn't anti-innovation leadership. This was a smart executive recognizing that innovation overload was preventing innovation success.

The impact: Even legitimate breakthroughs get dismissed as “more innovation theater” before receiving proper evaluation.

Type 2: Team Innovation Fatigue

The symptom: Innovation teams are burning out from launching initiatives that consistently get killed or ignored during the evaluation process.

The cause: Organizations creating continuous innovation pressure without building the decision infrastructure to evaluate and support breakthrough ideas properly.

At HP's IPO, I watched our most creative evaluators essentially stop fighting for breakthrough ideas. When I asked why, one told me: “When you're processing 60 pitches a week, you learn to spot the safe bets quickly. Fighting for the truly revolutionary ones takes energy I don't have anymore.”

This is innovation death by a thousand small compromises.

The impact: The best innovators leave for companies with more explicit innovation mandates and better decision-making processes.

Type 3: Market Innovation Fatigue

The symptom: Customers and investors becoming increasingly skeptical of innovation claims, treating all “breakthrough” announcements with equal skepticism.

The cause: “Revolutionary” has lost all meaning through overuse. Every product launch, every startup pitch, every feature update is positioned as game-changing innovation.

Consider how “AI-powered” became the new “cloud-enabled” – meaningless marketing speak that signals nothing about actual innovation value.

When everything is revolutionary, nothing is revolutionary.

The impact: Actual breakthroughs struggle to differentiate from incremental improvements because the market has developed immunity to innovation language.

Why This Crisis Is Unprecedented

This isn't just another innovation challenge we can solve with better processes or more resources. This crisis is fundamentally different from anything we've faced before.

Historically, innovation slowdowns were resource problems. Companies couldn't innovate because they lacked money, talent, or technology. The solution was always to invest more resources in innovation capability.

Today's crisis is a problem of attention and focus scarcity in an abundance economy. We have unlimited innovation opportunities and limited cognitive bandwidth to evaluate them properly.

More resources won't solve the attention mathematics.

Consider this trend: innovation proposals are growing exponentially, but human decision-making bandwidth remains constant.

The danger: We're not innovation-starved – we're innovation-overwhelmed. Breakthrough opportunities are getting lost in the noise of marginal improvements.

However, here's the opportunity: The companies that figure out attention allocation will dominate the next decade, while everyone else struggles with their own innovation success.

This isn't about having better ideas. It's about being heard above the innovation noise, and most organizations have no systematic approach to cutting through their own opportunity abundance.

Practical Framework: The Attention Audit

So what do you do about this? Let me share a practical framework I use with companies to diagnose and address innovation fatigue.

Step 1: Count Your Innovation Inputs

Track everything hitting your innovation pipeline for one month—ideas, pitches, proposals, “quick conversations” about breakthrough opportunities. You'll be shocked by the number.

Step 2: Calculate Your Evaluation Capacity

How many innovation decisions can your team properly evaluate monthly? Not skim – properly evaluate. Be brutally honest about the time quality evaluation requires.

Step 3: Identify the Attention Gap

Subtract your capacity from your inputs. That gap is where breakthrough ideas go to die.

Step 4: Design Attention Triage

Develop systematic methods to quickly identify the 10% of ideas that warrant in-depth evaluation. Not perfect – but systematic.

Step 5: Build Decision Infrastructure

Most companies have innovation processes but no decision infrastructure. These are different things.

Remember: The goal isn't to evaluate everything. The goal is to evaluate the right things properly.

Call-to-Action

Here's what I want you to do right now: Look at your innovation pipeline. How many ideas are currently stalled not because they lack merit, but because nobody has the attention bandwidth to evaluate them properly?

If you're honest, it's probably most of them.

Innovation fatigue is just one of ten critical innovation decision challenges that nobody's addressing directly. Over the past month, I've identified the unspoken problems that determine whether billion-dollar innovation bets succeed or fail.

Add your voice to choose which challenge I should cover in an upcoming episode. Should I reveal why smart teams kill their own best ideas? How fear corrupts innovation thinking? Why executives make terrible choices about breakthrough opportunities?

The voting is live right now in a special Studio Notes post: “You Get to Choose: Which Innovation Decision Topic Should I Tackle First?” Monday's complete analysis of innovation fatigue – including the case studies I couldn't share here – is in this week's regular Studio Notes.

Vote – What Should We Explore Next?

The companies that master innovation decisions while their competitors remain overwhelmed will write the next chapter of business history.

Which chapter will your company write?

If you want to improve the thinking behind your innovation decisions, check out our video on critical thinking skills – it's been our most popular this year. 

And don't forget: the complete innovation fatigue analysis, including what I learned from 30,000 failed evaluations at HP, is in this week's Studio Notes.

Share in the comments: What innovation decision challenge is keeping you awake at night?

To learn how I evaluated innovation ideas, listen to this week's show: I Evaluated Over 30,000 Innovation Ideas at HP: Here's Why Most Failed.

Get the tools to fuel your innovation journey → Innovation.Tools https://innovation.tools