The Truth Doesn’t Always Land Well
There’s nothing we can’t tell our clients. But there’s plenty they’d rather not hear.
When we advise organizations on building innovation capabilities, we often find ourselves pushing against deeply held assumptions — not because we enjoy being contrarian, but because the alternative is costly detours, stalled programs, and missed opportunities. The truths we share aren’t provocative for the sake of it — they’re based on experience, pattern recognition, and the realities of driving innovation inside large organizations.
The most common misconception? That you can build a high-performing innovation system without first understanding your organization’s current reality. But technique follows context. Until you’re clear on your culture, structure, urgency, and core competencies, your efforts are more likely to stall than scale.
Here are five things we do tell our clients, even when it’s uncomfortable.
1. You Can’t Skip the Crawl Phase and Still Expect to Run
The Preconception: “Let’s launch something bold to show results fast.”
The Reality: Without credibility and experience, bold initiatives collapse under their own ambition.
There’s a persistent desire to skip ahead to the exciting stuff: breakthrough innovations, disruptive ideas, horizon 2 and 3 bets. But when you launch these initiatives in organizations that have only ever focused on incremental improvements, the disconnect is jarring. People don’t believe the organization is truly willing to change, so they hold back. The result? Low engagement, tepid ideas, and eroded trust in the process.
A more effective approach is to start where there’s cultural readiness: cost savings, process fixes, quality improvements. This builds familiarity and credibility around the mechanisms of innovation. As confidence grows, so does the permission to operate in more adventurous spaces.
Change management is often underestimated. But without it, you’re not building an innovation system — you’re launching one-off experiments that won’t stick.
2. Suggestion Boxes Are Not a Strategy
The Preconception: “If we open up an idea channel, good things will come.”
The Reality: Open-ended suggestion schemes create noise, not value.
Despite years of evidence, many organizations still rely on push-based, always-on systems for collecting ideas. The problem? These mechanisms rarely yield anything useful outside a very narrow set of domains.
Suggestion schemes work only when there’s a consistent need, clear ownership, and the operational will to implement changes regularly. Think: safety improvements, quality fixes, frontline efficiency. Outside of that, they become dumping grounds for unrelated thoughts and unattached wish lists.
The promise of “build it and they will come” is appealing. But in practice, it leads to disengagement. People don’t see their ideas go anywhere, so they stop contributing.
For anything strategic, structured campaigns are far more effective. They bring focus, urgency, and a clear sense of ownership — exactly what passive suggestion schemes lack.
3. The Crowd Doesn’t Have the Answer (But It Has Part of It)
The Preconception: “Let’s crowdsource the next big idea.”
The Reality: The crowd can inform, but it can’t steer.
Crowdsourcing is often misunderstood. The idea that you can pose a big question to a broad group and then pick the top-voted idea as your next major initiative is dangerously simplistic. Employees don’t all have the same context. They don’t have insight into strategic goals, regulatory constraints, or commercial viability.
That doesn’t mean the crowd isn’t valuable. It is. But its role is to surface patterns, provoke thinking, and highlight blind spots. It is one input among many — not the steering wheel.
The same misconception now surrounds AI. Many leaders assume AI can replace judgment. But it can’t interpret your organizational context, align ideas with strategy, or lead change (yet…?). Like the crowd, it amplifies what you already understand. It doesn’t replace the need to understand it in the first place.
4. Buzzwords Won’t Save You
The Preconception: “We need a hackathon/incubator/lab to show we’re serious.”
The Reality: Tools are only as useful as the context they’re applied in.
The lack of standardization isn’t inherently bad… but it becomes a problem when these tools are deployed without clarity.
Innovation is an industry flooded with buzzwords. Ask ten people to define a “hackathon” and you’ll get ten different answers. The lack of standardization isn’t inherently bad — tools should be flexible — but it becomes a problem when these tools are deployed without clarity.
We see this often: an organization launches a lab or accelerator, but hasn’t defined its objectives or success measures. The initiative becomes a theater of innovation, full of activity but disconnected from strategic outcomes.
ISO 56001 is a welcome counterweight. It provides a shared framework for managing innovation more systematically. But even with this structure, it won’t tell you what to prioritize, how to pace your efforts, or which tools best match your environment.
You need to know your context before choosing your approach.
5. Start With Four Uncomfortable Questions
Before launching anything new, ask:
- Culture: What behaviors and beliefs actually shape how we work today? Are we truly ready to think and act differently?
- Structure: Where and how does innovation currently happen (or get blocked)? Are we centralized or decentralized? Aligned or fragmented?
- Objectives: What are we trying to achieve, and how urgently do we need to change? Is this about transformation or fine-tuning?
- Competencies & Assets: What are we really good at — beyond what we sell? What capabilities could we be leveraging more?
Most organizations can answer one or two of these with some confidence. But rarely all four. And that’s where problems start.
These questions shape everything: how you set priorities, which tools you choose, how fast you move, and where you need buy-in.
Frameworks like ISO 56001 are powerful. They give structure to innovation governance and vocabulary. But they won’t tell you your starting point. That takes honest reflection and internal alignment.
Final Thought: Real Innovation Is Earned
Challenging preconceptions isn’t just a matter of principle — it’s a practical necessity. Innovation that lasts doesn’t come from shortcuts, slogans, or off-the-shelf playbooks. It comes from clarity, structure, and the discipline to move at the right pace.
The organizations that succeed aren’t the ones that chase the trendiest formats or launch the flashiest campaigns. They’re the ones that ask better questions, build credibility over time, and align what they do with who they are.
Innovation isn’t about moving fast and breaking things. It’s about moving smart and building the right things — in the right order.
And sometimes, the hardest thing to hear is the one thing that makes all the difference.
Colin Nelson is Chief Innovation Consultant at HYPE Innovation.
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