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Innovation leaders often know how to manage success well. A fairly good idea is recognized, a strong contributor is rewarded, and the lessons from the win are carried into the next team project. In many cases, that is exactly the right organizational response.
But, sooner or later, most organizations have a different kind of success altogether — a next-level idea and success tied to one person: the engineer behind a product that changes the trajectory of a business unit; the scientist whose patent is embedded across product lines; the designer whose solution unlocks a long-stalled project. After a breakthrough like this, CEOs and managers often respond in the same way they would to any success, but with the volume turned up: more reward, more recognition, more autonomy, and a push toward the next big idea.
It’s the obvious response to exceptional success. Yet, the next big idea rarely comes. Our research suggests that this is because extreme success is not simply a bigger version of ordinary success. It can fundamentally change how innovators see themselves and how they respond to the people around them.
Drawing on both archival and experimental data, our research shows that innovators who deliver one extraordinary hit are strikingly unlikely to repeat it, and the way organizations manage them after the win is part of the reason why.1
The Stress of Exceptional Success
Why is extreme success particularly counterproductive for innovators? Our hypothesis was that the strengths that help someone produce a breakthrough are not always the same as the strengths necessary to sustain innovation over time. Why?
First, exceptional innovators may be highly skilled at solving hard problems, but they are not necessarily leaders who instinctively build teams or recognize and draw on the strengths of others. After an extreme success, the exceptional innovator may come to attribute the achievement mainly to their own talent and hard work and assume that they can do it again on their own. As a result, they may undervalue what a team can contribute and overestimate the costs of coordination. Consequently, even though their earlier success often attracts collaborators, they may see less need to work with others on the next idea.
Second, extreme success can inflate how innovators see their own status in the organization. This can shift their attention away from developing the next big idea and toward preserving the standing that came with the last one. Such a shift can also make them less open to feedback that could improve the next idea but might threaten their newly acquired standing.
To test our hypothesis, we looked first at four years of data from a global automotive company’s pool of 1,145 ideas submitted by 236 serial inventors. This company runs an internal ideation platform where employees can submit ideas. When an idea is selected and implemented, the inventor receives a monetary reward whose amount is set after the fact. There’s no cap on the reward: Most ideas earn modest amounts, but a few have generated significant payouts. It’s not a bonus or commission structure; the variable cash prizes are tied directly to the value of each idea.
The monetary rewards for implemented ideas in this full data set ranged from zero to 11,313 euros (about $13,112), with a mean of 290.83 euros and a standard deviation of 760.28 euros. We defined “extreme success” as an exceptionally large reward relative to the system’s normal reward pattern — specifically, one that exceeded 1,051 euros (one standard deviation above the mean).
In comparing innovators who had experienced extreme success with those who had not, we found that prior extreme success significantly reduced the likelihood of subsequent idea implementation by approximately 42%, on average.
This analysis supported our hypothesis about the rate of future success. Extreme success triggers two psychological shifts that explain its negative effect on future innovations. First, the success inflates inventors’ self-perceived social status within the organization. Second, it reduces their willingness to engage in team-based idea development: Team collaboration decreased by 16%, on average, after an extreme success, our research found. Notably, this pattern is not limited to purely individual wins; it can also emerge when the extreme-success idea is developed in a team.
Validating the Findings With a Randomized Experiment
To understand more about the cause of this dynamic, we set up an online experiment with 300 professionals in the U.K.
Participants were instructed to imagine themselves as employees at a confectionery company that was organizing an innovation contest to develop a new kid-friendly packaging design. They read a detailed brief about the contest requirements, which included submitting a 500-word proposal that included details related to visuals and interactive elements of the new packaging design. To make the task feel more realistic and engaging to the test subjects, participants were asked to submit a short written overview outlining their proposed design.
Following the submission of their ideas, each participant received a randomly assigned evaluation from a supposed expert panel. Contestants rated as extremely successful were told that their proposal surpassed all expectations and scored 95 out of 100, while those in the ordinary success condition were told that their proposal met all expectations, with a score of 70, and those in the failure condition were told that their proposal fell short of the expectations and scored only 40.
To measure self-perceived social status, participants were then presented with an image of a ladder with rungs representing employees’ standing within the company based on their role in driving innovation. Participants were informed that people at the top of the ladder were the most influential in driving innovation — that they received the most recognition for their innovative ideas, earned the highest respect for their contributions, and were seen as leaders in innovation. In contrast, at the bottom were people with the least influence on innovation, who were least recognized for their ideas, received little respect for their contributions as innovators, and were not seen as leaders in innovation. Participants were then asked to consider how their colleagues would rate them and to select the number (on a 0-10 scale) that best reflected their position on the ladder.
After their valuation and self-evaluation, participants were invited to enter another contest, to develop a new chocolate flavor, and were presented with the following question: “As you prepare for the contest, you have a chance to join a team of your colleagues who have invited you to join their team. How would you prefer to participate in this contest?”
As we found in our automotive company’s ideation platform data, participants who had been rated as extraordinary successes saw themselves as better innovators and were less interested in joining a team.
Preventing One-Hit Wonders: Four Best Practices
Extremely successful innovators and contributors are disproportionately important for organizations. They signal exceptional talent, shape outcomes, and raise the bar for everyone around them. Yet, the very success that marks them as stars can undermine what they do next. We are not suggesting that extreme
