According to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University, the average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today.

As the consumer moves faster, business must be more agile to compete.. or they die.   For this reason, it is now commonplace rhetoric to believe in the importance of innovation for business health.

Our belief is that for innovation to really drive growth, it needs to be anchored in the unmet needs or painpoints of our consumers but the solutions need to be tested with rigor.

So what happened at Gladwrap last month?

The recent much-publicised Gladwrap innovation #fail highlights that unmet needs are just the beginning.

A few weeks ago and following an “unprecedented” amount of feedback, Gladwrap was forced to make a statement that they would re-instate their the cutter bar back to it’s original position, despite having conducted “rigorous and extensive” in-home research that told them that consumers wanted the cutter on the inside of the lid rather than bottom of the box.

One consumer described the new product as “60m of torture”, while another tried to sell an old box on eBay as a rare item, prompting the brand to announce on its Facebook page the move back to the original product.

So what did Gladwrap do wrong?

While we can only speculate, it would appear that following the initial in-home research, Gladwrap failed to subsequently test what it thought was a winning idea. The key to great innovation is an iterative process, where consumer feedback is generated a number of times before arriving at the final concept.

In this instance, the business got themselves into a tangle that could have easily been avoided by letting the process roll.