# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #20: Don’t Be Motorola By ## Article Content I've been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I've discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next. I've come back to this idea repeatedly in my work because the mindset behind innovation usually changes before the results do. What people notice, question, challenge, and act on determines how ready they are for what comes next. I have often used the shorthand "#MOTOFAIL" to describe a particular innovation tragedy: a smart company with extraordinary technical capability that still misses the shift around it. That kind of failure is more instructive than simple incompetence. It proves that knowledge, patents, engineering talent and market share are not enough. Success can trap a company inside the assumptions that created it. The most dangerous sentence in strategy is not "we don't know how." It is "we already know this market." Innovation failure often happens when expertise turns into certainty. So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start. Action Items: Identify one belief your company holds because it used to be true. Ask what a new entrant would do if it had none of your legacy assumptions. Make someone responsible for challenging the logic behind your strongest franchise. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series. Real-World Examples These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world. Garmin: How a navigation company survived the smartphone When phones began offering turn-by-turn navigation, the stand-alone GPS device appeared to have an expiration date. Garmin had helped make in-car navigation mainstream. Now the same feature could be downloaded onto a device customers already carried. The threat was not theoretical: a valuable consumer product category was being absorbed into something bigger. Garmin did experiment with phones, including its nüvifone, but the venture did not become its answer. Instead, the company concentrated investment where its satellite-navigation expertise could make a more durable difference: fitness watches, outdoor equipment, marine electronics and aviation systems. Those buyers needed reliability and specialist capabilities beyond a basic map on a phone. The change was visible in its numbers. Garmin's fitness business generated more than $1 billion in 2019, according to Fortune, while its automotive-navigation business had become a much smaller piece of the company. Garmin's subsequent filings describe a business organized around fitness, outdoor, aviation, marine and automotive original equipment rather than a single consumer gadget. The revealing point is that Garmin did not save the old in-car device category. It saved the capabilities and customer knowledge behind it. The company recognized that its market definition had become obsolete, then looked for segments where its underlying expertise still mattered. Why it matters: When a product disappears into a larger platform, defend the valuable customer problem, not the old product category. Sources: Palm and HP: A promising operating system without a durable position Palm had helped define handheld computing, and its webOS software later won admirers for interface design and multitasking. But a technically attractive platform was not enough when the smartphone industry began consolidating around competing hardware, operating systems, developer ecosystems and distribution channels. Palm's historic competence did not guarantee a place in the new market. HP acquired Palm in 2010 for approximately $1.2 billion, hoping to create an integrated mobile platform. It launched the webOS-powered TouchPad tablet, while also planning phones and other devices. The hardware strategy was short-lived. In August 2011, HP announced that it would discontinue operations for webOS devices, including the TouchPad and its phones. HP said the devices had failed to achieve sufficient consumer traction. The decision came only weeks after the TouchPad's release. The technology did not vanish immediately, but the acquisition had failed to produce a sustainable independent consumer-hardware ecosystem. A well-regarded operating system could not compensate for an inadequate market position. The caution is more specific than 'an incumbent missed smartphones.' Palm and HP understood much of the technology. What they could not build quickly enough was the complete combination of product, developers, distribution and customer adoption. Technical talent and a legacy in the category were not enough. Why it matters: Innovation capability does not substitute for market timing, distribution and an ecosystem customers will adopt. Sources: --- --- Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/10/how-innovation-happens-lesson-020/