Cover of Unlocking Innovation by Robyn M. Bolton

Why Do Most Innovation Efforts Fail?

Only 1 in every 50,000 incubated ideas reaches $1 million in sales. If you ask most corporate executives why their companies’ innovation efforts fail, they’ll blame a lack of ideas or not enough big ideas. Innovation expert Robyn M. Bolton knows that innovation isn’t an idea problem, it’s a leadership problem. To drive real innovation, executives must defy the very instincts and behaviors that made them successful operators.

In Unlocking Innovation, Bolton draws on her twenty-five years of advising leaders to provide a practical, holistic innovation framework. Her ABCs of Innovation show leaders how to reshape their roles, teams, and organizations to create new value and catalyze corporate renewal from within. Using real-life stories, Bolton follows innovation leaders’ trajectories from heading up a new team and generating first results to navigating the inevitable crosswinds, complications, and conflicts—and ultimately delivering success.

Unlocking Innovation is an essential guide for any leader tasked with innovating inside an established organization.

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Boost Your Behaviors

The Leader’s Notebook will help you transform your innovation leadership potential into real-world impact and cement your legacy.  You’ll reflect, plan, and grow through guided exercises designed to help you build the leadership behaviors to tackle your biggest challenges and achieve your boldest aspirations.

32 pages of prompts to help you:

  • Understand your instincts and what you are and aren’t willing to do to innovate
  • Clarify and socialize your organization’s identity and aspirations
  • Look back, around, and ahead as you and your team move forward

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robyn M. Bolton is the founder and chief navigator of MileZero, a consultancy that helps leaders use innovation to confidently and consistently grow revenue. She is also an assistant professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she teaches innovation and strategy courses.

She previously worked at Innosight, the innovation and strategy firm founded by Clayton Christensen; the Boston Consulting Group; and Procter & Gamble, where she helped develop and launch Swiffer. Bolton holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in marketing from Miami University.

Her writing and perspective ­have been featured in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review online, the New York Times, and NPR’s Marketplace. In 2026, she was named to Thinkers50 Radar List of the top 30 thought leaders to watch in the coming year.

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