There is a romantic version of innovation that many of us carry around with us. In this version, a brilliant individual has a flash of insight in the shower, or a small team works obsessively in a garage, and something transformative emerges. The idea arrives. The world changes.
It makes for a great story. And occasionally, it's even true.
But here is the reality. If you run an organisation and your innovation strategy depends on waiting for moments of genius, you don't really have a strategy at all. You have a hope. And in competitive markets, hope is not a sustainable advantage.
The companies that innovate most consistently are not the ones with the most brilliant individuals. They are the ones who have learned to treat innovation not as an event, but as a process.
Not as something that happens to a business, but as something a business deliberately does.
The Difference Between Accidental and Intentional Innovation
Most organisations innovate occasionally. A competitor launches something new, forcing a response. A customer’s complaint is loud enough to prompt a product redesign. A new hire brings a fresh perspective and something improves. These are real innovations, but they are reactive. Driven by external pressure rather than internal intent.
Intentional innovation is different. It means building the structures, habits, and cultures that generate new ideas continuously, rigorously evaluate them, and systematically bring the best ones to life. It means innovation is not waiting for a crisis or a genius. It is woven into the organisation’s ordinary work.
Reactive innovation is always catching up. Intentional innovation creates the conditions to get ahead and stay there.
What It Means to Treat Innovation as a Process
When we say innovation should be a process, we mean it should be treated with the same organisational seriousness as other core business functions. Finance has systems, reporting lines, and regular cycles. Marketing has campaigns, measurement frameworks, and feedback loops. Operations has quality controls, efficiency metrics, and continuous improvement programmes.
Innovation deserves the same rigour. In practical terms, this means several things.
It needs a dedicated resource. Innovation does not happen in the gaps between other priorities. Organisations that say they value innovation but assign no budget, time, or people to it are not serious about it. This does not always mean a large R&D department. But it does mean that innovation gets protected time and genuine investment.
It needs a defined process for generating and evaluating ideas. Where do new ideas come from in your organisation? Who can submit them? How are they assessed? What happens to the ones that don't make it? More importantly, what happens to the ones that do?
Without answers to these questions, innovation becomes random. A good innovation process makes this explicit and fair.
It needs clear ownership. Someone - or some team - needs to be responsible for driving innovation forward. This does not mean that innovation is only their job. It means that someone is accountable for ensuring the process works and that momentum is maintained when the day-to-day pressure of running the business threatens to crowd out everything else.
It needs to be connected to strategy. One of the most common failures in corporate innovation is the pursuit of novelty for its own sake. Effective innovation processes are anchored in strategic intent. The question is not just ‘what could we do?’ but ‘what should we do, given where we are trying to get to?’
We’ll have a deeper dive into innovation strategy in a separate post.
The Innovation Funnel
One of the most useful ways to think about innovation as a process is through the metaphor of a funnel. At the wide end, you generate many ideas. They’re broad, diverse, and exploratory.
As you move through the funnel, you apply increasing scrutiny: which ideas are technically feasible? Which are commercially viable? Which align with strategic priorities? Which can actually be delivered?
By the time you reach the narrow end, you have a much smaller number of ideas. But they are the ones most likely to succeed.
The funnel model has a few important implications. First, it means you need volume at the top. If you only generate three ideas a year, the chances that one of them will be genuinely valuable are low. Filling the funnel with high-quality raw material is as important as refining it.
Second, it means that most ideas will, and should, fail to make it through. This is not a problem; it is the point. The funnel is a filtering mechanism. An organisation that pursues every idea is just as ineffective as one that pursues none. The goal is rigorous selection, not exhaustive execution.
Third, it means the process needs to be kind to early-stage ideas. Applying the same level of scrutiny to a rough concept as to a fully developed proposal will kill promising ideas before they have had a chance to develop. Different stages of the funnel require different types of evaluation.
The Role of Culture
Process alone is not enough. You can design a perfect innovation system and watch it fail because the culture around it is wrong.
The most common cultural barriers to innovation are well documented. Fear of failure discourages people from putting forward ideas that might not work. Hierarchy concentrates decision-making at the top, away from the people who often have the best insight into customers, products, and processes. Short-termism crowds out the longer-horizon thinking that innovation requires.
Addressing these cultural barriers is not soft or secondary work. It is as important as the structural design of the innovation process itself. Organisations that celebrate intelligent failures, that actively solicit ideas from frontline employees, and that create protected time and space for exploratory thinking consistently outperform those that don't.