Success can trap even the speedboats of a company into believing their one brilliant win is enough. It isn't. Companies must continue to innovate and learn, try and fail, learn more and stretch to find what's new. Because in every category, someone is out there willing to fight to make an impact. And those without the roadblock of success can do amazing things before they're told those things can't be done.

On the other end of the spectrum is failure, which leads to risk aversion. They say if a cat sits on a hot stove and gets burned he'll never sit on a hot stove again. The problem is that he won't sit on a cold one, either.

I worked with a company once that had tried a number of innovation approaches years before. During one intense period they'd tried consultants, students, PhDs and more only to come up short. So they stopped innovating and just focused on legacy products.

The tankers of the company convinced everyone that innovation was a bad thing and pointed to the old data as proof.

After a scare from a competitor, new management turned the innovation spigot back on and the company lived to fight another day.