Date:
Author:
in2o Team
001
Why good ideas evaporate
An innovation week produces a wall of ideas and a good feeling. Six weeks later the wall is gone and nothing has changed. This is not a failure of creativity; it is a failure of the path an idea has to travel afterwards.
An idea needs a route: somewhere to be submitted, someone obliged to respond within a known time, a small budget it can draw on to be tested, and a decision point where it is either backed or closed with a reason. Where that route does not exist, the only ideas that survive are the ones belonging to people senior enough to bypass it.
002
An operating model, not an events calendar
Treating innovation as a calendar of events puts the emphasis on visibility. Treating it as an operating model puts the emphasis on throughput.
The model is not complicated: a defined intake, a triage that filters on strategic fit rather than novelty, a testing stage with a fixed budget and duration, and a scaling stage with a named business owner. What makes it work is that each stage has an owner, a time limit, and an explicit standard for moving forward. What makes it fail is running it as a side responsibility for people whose main job is something else.
003
Funding, and the right to say no
Innovation portfolios rot when nothing is ever stopped. Every unclosed pilot consumes attention, and after two years the portfolio is a list of things nobody is willing to declare finished.
Two mechanisms prevent this. The first is a small, ring-fenced testing budget that is genuinely allowed to be spent on things that turn out not to work. The second is the right to say no early and publicly, with the reason recorded. An organization that cannot stop initiatives cannot start meaningful ones.
004
Build the capability, don’t rent it
External support is useful for building a capability and damaging as a substitute for one. The test is what remains after the engagement ends: whether the team can run the next cycle without the consultant, using the same tools and the same standard.
That means the work has to be done with the team rather than for them — decisions made in the open, methods handed over rather than described, and at least one full cycle run by internal staff while support is still available. Capability that lives only in a final report is not capability.
