Innovation has this weird reputation.
Like it lives in some glass room, filled with sticky notes, big promises, and people wearing sneakers to meetings. And leaders, even smart ones, fall for that image. They start hunting for “innovative ideas” the way you’d hunt for a rare gemstone.
Then months later they’re frustrated because nothing really changed. Maybe they launched a lab. Maybe they ran a hackathon. Maybe they hired a Head of Innovation. And still, the core business feels… the same.
The issue is not that leaders don’t care. A lot of them care a lot.
It’s that they often aim at the wrong target. They treat innovation like a thing you can buy, schedule, or announce. When in reality it’s more like a habit. Or a capability. Or honestly, a messy set of tradeoffs you commit to over time.
So yeah. Here’s what most leaders get wrong about innovation. Not in a “you’re doing everything wrong” way. More like, these are the traps that quietly kill good ideas before they ever get a chance.
They think innovation is ideas
Leaders say they want innovation, but what they often mean is “bring me better ideas.”
Which sounds reasonable until you see how it plays out.
A team presents a new concept. The leader nods. Everyone gets excited. Then the questions start.
What’s the ROI? What’s the five year forecast? How does this fit into current KPIs? Can we do it with the existing team and no extra budget?
And at that point, the idea is basically being forced to behave like a mature business line. Before it has even been born. So it gets watered down, or parked, or sent into a committee spiral.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Most organizations don’t have an idea problem. They have a follow through problem.
Ideas are cheap. Everywhere. Your employees have them. Your customers have them. Your competitors definitely have them. The real bottleneck is turning uncertainty into something shippable without demanding certainty too early.
Innovation is not brainstorming.
Innovation is the ability to take a small, risky bet, learn quickly, and build something real without getting crushed by the system.
They confuse activity with progress
Innovation theater is real. And it’s not always intentional.
It’s the startup office tour. The “innovation day” event. The lab with a cool name. The internal pitch contest where the winners get applause and then… nothing.
Lots of motion. Not much momentum.
Progress is boring sometimes. Progress looks like a team quietly running ten experiments, killing eight, scaling one, and doing it again. Progress looks like arguing over the onboarding flow for a pilot product, not designing a futuristic slide deck.
Leaders love visible signals because signals are easy to communicate upward. To the board. To investors. To the company.
But innovation doesn’t care about optics. It cares about outcomes. And outcomes usually require repetition, patience, and a tolerance for things that look unimpressive at first.
If your innovation program produces more presentations than prototypes, you’re not innovating. You’re performing.
They over protect the core, then wonder why nothing new grows This one is subtle. Because protecting the core is not stupid. The core pays the bills. The core is
where customers are. The core is what you’re judged on.
But many leaders treat the core like a sacred object. Any disruption is seen as a threat. Any new approach is treated like disrespect.
So innovation gets shoved into a corner.
A small team, limited influence, no real access to the customer, no authority to change how work gets done. Basically a sandbox with walls too high.
Then leadership asks why innovation isn’t producing meaningful revenue. Well. Because it can’t. It’s not allowed to touch anything that would actually make it meaningful. The best companies don’t “choose” between core and new. They run a portfolio.
They defend and optimize the core. And at the same time, they invest in new bets that might cannibalize it, or reshape it, or replace it later. Not because they want chaos. Because they understand time.
If you only optimize what already works, you eventually become incredible at yesterday. They demand certainty from things that are, by definition, uncertain
A lot of leaders are data driven. That’s good.
But innovation requires a different relationship with data.
In the core business, you want predictability. You want efficiency. You want repeatable processes. You measure performance with precision.
In innovation work, you’re trying to discover what works. That’s not the same. Early data is messy. Customer feedback is contradictory. Prototypes are half broken. Metrics shift as you learn what to even measure.
If you demand the same level of confidence you require for a mature product launch, you will kill anything that hasn’t already been proven somewhere else.
And then you’ll only “innovate” by copying competitors. Which is fine sometimes. But it’s not innovation. It’s catching up.
A better question for early stage work is not “what’s the ROI.”
It’s:
What have we learned? What assumptions did we test? What would need to be true for this to work? What’s the cheapest way to find out?
That’s how uncertainty gets reduced. Not by planning harder. By learning faster. They think innovation is a department
This is maybe the most common mistake. Innovation gets assigned to a team called Innovation. And then the rest of the organization relaxes. As if the job has been outsourced. But innovation doesn’t scale through a department. It scales through behavior.
If product teams are punished for small failures, they will avoid experiments. If legal takes three months to review a pilot, pilots will die. If finance refuses to fund anything without a business case, business cases will be invented. If managers reward execution only, creativity will be treated like a distraction.
So yes, having a dedicated team can help. Someone needs to shepherd new bets, create frameworks, and protect early work from the immune system.
But if the culture, incentives, and decision processes don’t support experimentation, that team becomes a lonely island.
And eventually it becomes the place ideas go to disappear politely.
Innovation is cross functional by nature. It sits in the gaps between teams. It needs product, ops, sales, support, security, procurement, and leadership to move in the same direction, even if they move at different speeds.
They punish the very behavior they say they want
Leaders say they want bold thinking.
Then someone takes a risk, and it doesn’t work, and the postmortem becomes a blame session. Or a career limiting moment. People notice. They always notice.
So next time, nobody takes the risk.
This is how organizations train themselves into stagnation. It’s not because employees are lazy. It’s because they are adaptive. They learn what is safe.
If you want innovation, you have to make intelligent failure survivable. Not celebrated in a fake way. Just survivable. There’s a difference.
You can still hold teams accountable. You should. But the accountability needs to be aimed at the process.
Did we test the right assumptions? Did we talk to customers? Did we run the experiment properly? Did we make a clear decision with what we learned?
If yes, and it still failed, good. That is literally the point. You paid for learning instead of paying for denial.
They don’t invest in the “boring” parts of innovation
Innovation is often sold as creativity. Brainstorms. Vision. Big leaps.
But execution is where it lives. And execution involves boring stuff.
Instrumentation. Customer support for pilots. Documentation. Operational readiness. Integration with existing systems. Security reviews. Data governance. Pricing. Distribution. Training sales teams. Setting up feedback loops.
If you ignore those, your innovation work stays trapped in prototype land.
Leaders sometimes underfund these pieces because they don’t feel innovative. They feel like operational overhead. But without them, you don’t get real adoption. You get demos.
A new product that cannot be sold, supported, or delivered is not innovation. It is a project.
And the gap between a project and a product is usually filled with boring work that nobody wants to sponsor. Until a competitor does it and eats your lunch.
They talk about speed, but design a slow system
Every leader wants faster innovation. Of course.
But then they run it through the same approval stack as everything else.
Multiple committees. Multiple stakeholder check ins. Quarterly planning cycles. Budget gates. Procurement processes that assume you’re buying a building, not testing a tool.
Speed is not a motivational speech. Speed is a system.
If you want fast experimentation, you need:
Small budgets teams can access without drama. Clear risk thresholds. What can be tried without executive approval. Short decision cycles. Weekly or biweekly, not quarterly. A culture that values “decision and learn” more than “discuss and align forever.”
Alignment is good. But over alignment is just fear in a suit.
They expect innovation to come from “different people” instead of upgrading the people they already have
Some leaders think innovation requires unicorn talent. They go hunting for it. They hire a few
people from trendy companies. They assume that will fix it.
Sometimes it helps. Fresh perspective matters.
But it can also backfire. Because the problem is often not talent. It’s the environment. A brilliant builder in a rigid system will either adapt downward or leave.
Also, your existing teams probably understand customers, constraints, and market reality better than any outsider. That’s gold. The real move is to give them better tools and permission to work differently.
Train product managers on discovery. Train engineers on rapid prototyping and experimentation. Train leaders on how to sponsor ambiguity. Teach teams how to write assumptions and design tests.
And then protect time for that work. Real time. Not “do innovation after your normal job.” People can grow into innovative behavior. But they need air cover.
They chase “new” instead of chasing “better”
Not all innovation is flashy.
Some of the highest leverage innovation is reducing friction. Removing steps. Killing pointless policies. Fixing broken handoffs. Making the customer experience less annoying.
But leaders often ignore that because it doesn’t sound like innovation. It sounds like operations.
Yet a company that continually improves how it delivers value will outperform a company that periodically announces big bets and then fails to integrate them.
There are different types of innovation. You need all of them.
Incremental innovation keeps you competitive and compounding. Adjacent innovation expands your market. Transformational innovation changes what you are.
The mistake is treating only the last one as “real.” That makes teams chase grand narratives instead of meaningful impact.
Sometimes innovation is just making the payment flow not suck. And that can be worth millions. What good innovation leadership actually looks like
Not glamorous. Usually not loud. More like consistent.
Good innovation leaders tend to do a few things well:
They set a clear strategy for where innovation should focus. Not “be innovative.” More like, these customer problems, these markets, these constraints. They fund a portfolio, not a single bet. Some safe, some risky, some weird. They build systems for experimentation. Governance that is lighter, faster, and appropriate to the stage. They protect teams from premature ROI demands while still requiring learning discipline. They reward truth telling. Bad news early. Clear decisions. No hiding. They make it easy for innovation to connect back to the core, so successful pilots can scale.
And they model curiosity. Which sounds soft, but it’s actually hard. Curiosity means admitting you might be wrong. In leadership, that takes backbone.
A simple way to spot if you’re serious about innovation
Ask two questions.
When was the last time we killed a project quickly because we learned it would not work?
When was the last time we scaled something new because the data showed it was working, even though it threatened an existing plan?
If the answer to both is “I’m not sure” or “that rarely happens,” you’re probably not running an innovation system. You’re running a planning system.
And planning is not bad. It’s just not the same thing.
Innovation needs room for discovery. And discovery is not neat.
FAQ
What is the biggest misconception leaders have about innovation?
That innovation is mostly about generating new ideas. In reality, most companies have plenty of ideas. The hard part is building a repeatable system to test assumptions, learn fast, and scale what works.
How do you measure innovation without killing it?
Use stage appropriate metrics. Early on, measure learning velocity, number of tested assumptions, customer engagement, and evidence of demand. Later, shift toward retention, unit economics, revenue, and scalability.
Should every company have an innovation lab?
Not necessarily. A lab can help if it is connected to real customer problems, has a path to production, and can influence the core business. Without those, it often becomes innovation
theater.
Why do innovation projects get stuck in pilot mode?
Because the boring scaling work is underfunded or blocked. Things like integration, compliance, support, sales enablement, and operational readiness are what turn a prototype into a real product.
How can leaders encourage risk taking without creating chaos?
Set clear guardrails. Define what kinds of experiments teams can run without heavy approval, cap the budget per experiment, require clear hypotheses, and make failure survivable if the process was sound.
Is incremental improvement considered innovation?
Yes. Incremental innovation compounds and often produces the most reliable gains. The mistake is only valuing big, disruptive moves and ignoring steady improvements that make the customer experience better.
What should leaders do first if they want more innovation?
Pick a few strategic problem areas, fund small cross functional teams to run experiments, shorten decision cycles, and change incentives so teams are rewarded for learning and truth telling, not just for flawless execution.