Although much has been said about user driven innovation, the results are less than impressive

guaranteed 50% failure rate

The practitioners, and there are many, of user driven innovation claim that user input in the design process guarantees a better product success rate.

According to studies, projects where user driven innovation is used, the success rate is only 50%. Those are not very good odds; even money actually. Only every other product will actually make any return on investment. The rest fail and were guaranteed to fail from the outset. I don't know about you, but I have better things to do with my youth than to participate in failures.

Considering the fact that users have been involved in the input to the design and development team, why is this rate of success so miserable?

Simple: It doesn't take into account that user feedback is lousy input for the basis of concept innovation.

what works better? 

Outcome based innovation!! People use products to do jobs. There are ways to benchmark and quantify the qualities and features that are needed to make the best tools to do the job. User driven innovation doesn't supply us with this critical information.

When we first investigate the particulars of the job we want our products and tools to achieve we have a way to couple benchmarks and expectations to physical products. This outcome driven approach feeds into the development pipeline by by adding input that is useful as well as verifiable.

tasks determine outcomes

Users know the right outcome when they see it. They just can't express it beforehand. Thats what outcome based innovation is all about: providing marketers, designers and developers with useful information so they can achieve a success rate better than 50%.