Hard work vs genius

Would we have good music, art, or technology if people
didn't work hard for them?

It may sound cliché, but there's no such thing as a genius innovator. Edison, Ford, Einstein, Jobs, and many others brought about genially fresh ideas and they worked really hard. Edison tried hundreds of times before successfully designing a decent lightbulb, Ford was obsessed with cost savings, Einstein was considered inapt for mathematics as a child, and Jobs loved simplicity. What do these innovators from different eras have in common? They all had a strong vision but they all worked hard to achieve their goals.

95% of new products fail

You came upon something that's different or groundbreaking and you know it has tons of potential. You've done it before, introduced an awesome product without capturing your customers' attention. How do you achieve your product's potential when up to 95% of new products fail?

You don't fail enough!

Failure is an essential part of innovation. A successful company:

• must be hedge failure—many risks should result in a reward, but if every "risk" succeeds you are not pushing any boundaries. If every
• take risks—if you fail because you didn't take risks your clients fled to the competition or substitute products. If you don't innovate you become a dinosaur.
• should accept failure—this point is very important, not just because of best practices for innovation. If you don't accept failure, employees are often fearful for their jobs and could try to coverup mistakes until they blow up. If you accept that even the best employees will fail, you can manage their projects better.
• learn from its failed projects and review them.

Why hire innovators?

"You snooze, you lose." The two "most obvious" reasons a company innovates are to catch up to a changing industry and market and to gain the upper hand on competitors.

Are these reasons compelling enough for a company to  hire innovators? My biased opinion is no, they should use their internal talent, unless the company is large (economies of scale).