After 10+ years with significant improvements, lots of patents, and interesting novelties but no real breakthrough innovation, more and more CEOs wonder why. What is it that makes it so hard to deliver a disruptive innovation? They have invested so much in brilliant experts, scientists, and researchers but no innovation. They engaged with many startups – even acquired one or more, but there is no sign that it makes a difference. As a result, more and more innovation centers get closed. The past years could be seen as Innovation Winter for enterprises. At the same time, the number of Unicorns grew above 1,000 and counting, ready to disrupt different industries. Is that just the way it is? Absolutely not !!!
Innovation…
1) …can only be mastered when corporate leadership knows how to create it
2) …needs a purpose that states the importance of an organization
3) …needs a strategy for how to identify and create the unknown
4) …is one of the intellectually most demanding jobs
5) …requires a profoundly different organizational structure compared to enterprises
6) …requires different processes and KPIs to manage it
7) …has the potential to solve problems of any complexity, meaning any problem
1) Understand how someone creates Innovation
Innovation can only be mastered when corporate leadership knows how to create it – without becoming a technology expert or neuroscientist. Starting at ground zero: Ideas are created in the brain. Our brain cells deal with past experiences/sensations but cannot look into the future. And there is no random idea generator anywhere in our brains. Ideas get created by comparing and mixing those experiences, and humans have that sensational ability to imagine something new based on the mixture of experiences – we call that creativity. Neuroscience developed an excellent understanding of how our neurons connect to combine experiences we had or have in the very moment and create new virtual experiences. But even that is not random but based on stimulation. When stimulating our brain in certain sequences with specific methods, questions, impressions, and so forth, we now can purposefully create ideas that contribute to the solution of a problem – without any drugs. The same stimuli that top entrepreneurs had intuitively used without even knowing. Moreover, a team collaborating on solution development in a highly focused way will create a breakthrough solution in four weeks. Any additional time would not create any better ideas. Understanding that basic concept is enough to either learn more about it or task a c-level executive to take it forward. Having the concept is only the starting point.
2) Define your purpose of Innovation
The power of solving nearly any problem bears the question of what problem YOU will want to solve for your business and your customers and shareholders. An innovation team in a vacuum is as good or bad as having no innovation team. Why do you need innovation? To address a new market and grow the company? To compensate for declining revenue as a technology or industry segment, you serve changes focus? To solve a significant problem that is known, exists for a while, and nobody wanted to solve it because it is too hard? Remember JFK in the sixties stating when announcing to go to the moon: “We don’t do it because it is easy; we do it because it is hard.” Leading an entire nation to something significant is as hard as leading an enterprise to something great. Leadership is – and will remain to be hard. But survival as a follower is not much easier and far less rewarding. On top of all – you will only attract top talents when the challenge is: to make the impossible a reality.
3) Make innovation a mission-critical initiative.
Innovation must be a business strategy that defines very clear goals and the possible paths to get there. Knowing how innovation is created opens completely new opportunities. Defining those opportunities as goals and identify teams who can do it and leaders who can navigate them is a key part of the strategy. That strategy would result in an Executive Innovation Mandate, stating the Significance, Scope, and Magnitude of the innovation the executives are looking for. Today, a team may get very excited about a business opportunity with a 50 Million revenue potential, but in a 50 Billion enterprise, that would represent 0.1% revenue contribution. And if it is necessary to replace a 5 billion business unit focused on combustion engine technology, a new tool for bicycle repair would not mean anything. The innovation strategy, however, remains a different beast than any other business strategy. This mainly because we don’t want to follow any random idea, where we don’t know the outcome, but a problem that we jet have to identify. Hence, an Innovation Meta Strategy is an umbrella strategy that leads to INNOVATION as a result and not to a specific solution. Craft the meta strategy as a guidance mechanism that includes general objectives, the way to identify solutions for problems, that are relevant to the company, and their customers. And yes constraints are ok. Infinite openness is a myth because our brain can hardly deal with it.
Let the team know the expectations instead of experimenting in the dark.
4) Attract teams with innovation-relevant cognitive abilities.
Innovation is one of the intellectually most demanding jobs. Why do more startups fail than win? Lots of theories are out there. The most simplified yet essential rule is “top teams make something out of nothing.” This follows the question of what those top teams have that the others don’t. Warning: Degrees, certificates, and titles make no difference at all. Remember: the most successful startups are dropouts. Curiosity, Courage, Creativity, Clairvoyance and Collaboration… are some of the top eight cognitive abilities an innovation Dream Team needs to have.
Make 100% sure that the innovation teams do not get distracted with other tasks. IN many cases just a small job will through their brainwork off for days. Having part time innovators is a guaranty for failure. And putting people in their just because they want to is a risk. Ensure their ability and the background for the team composition is a match.
You will be surprised to hear that most enterprises with more than 1,000 employees have those talents already today – but not a single one is involved in innovation. Experts like scientists, engineers, physicists, biologists and so forth are ok to have one in the team but they need to do something that is extremely hard: forget what they learned and be rightfully proud of and question their own work. So, why torture them?
5) Allow an Innovation relevant Organization
Your enterprise works because your employees learned to leverage the processes you have and don’t wonder every day how to improve them and try something different. If there is a need for change it must be coordinated across larger parts of the enterprise. Forget to make your enterprise more entrepreneurial. You would be bankrupt before you even see a beginning of a change. An enterprise works every single day because of its hyper-detailed processes. No room for error, and zero experimentation.
An innovation team however, need to question each and every aspect of a product, a sales process, or the customer experience, to make an innovation a breakthrough for its target audience. Innovation teams are small and extremely fast. If they need something they need it now – not based on processes, time or budget requests. Managers need to know the budget by hard and what they spent so far to make a decision on the spot. Innovation teams need to reach out to selected customers any time and not wait for a response from a sales organization that is in a critical deal. Go-to-market methods need to be tested without requiring the blessing from brand marketing, PR and others. Of course an innovation team may need to live with some constraints in order to leverage the available resources, but all that must be clear ahead of time not under way.
Your Innovation Dream Team WANTS to make the impossible a reality. To do so they live in the most competitive environment – competing with the rest of the world. The innovation culture will need to reflect that. A lego playground is the last thing true innovators want to see. Innovation teams work under extreme conditions – against time, budgets, and other innovators, where new pop up every morning. For them it is all about relentless execution.
Most innovation teams will threaten you to leave the company if you come up with management, processes, KPIs, or even constraints on what to innovate. It’s OK to let them find other opportunities. No Unicorn on earth has been built like that. Every innovation we have today took more than five years to be globally recognized and ten years to become a dominant player in its industry. This Innovation-Market-Dynamic dictates timing more than anything else. Innovation opportunity discovery, problem validation, deep-dive into neuro ideation, innovation summit, solution validation, innovation financing, solution building, innovation-to-market, exponential growth, and finally, global innovation scaling are all distinct processes that can’t be found anywhere in any global enterprise. Those process elements also generate tens of thousands of data points and feed an intelligent KPI Framework. One of the biggest problems of the past was the step-by-step experimentation. Lets do this and then see how it is going. Innovation needs a holistic view to understand it and build it in a way that the outcome is in the DNA of every step of the way. Always keep in mind: There is a reason why the Fortune 5,000 companies around the globe were unable to bring a breakthrough innovation to market.
7) Re-design our enterprise for a future of large scale innovation.
Today enterprises seem to run behind startups, see them as the biggest competition, more agile, a threat and something hard to grab. And those startups do deserve all our full respect for the solutions they build. Yet, there is also a significant limitation to the type of problems they can solve. We have seen a dozens of startups try to push mini satellites to space for all kinds of purposes. But it took an enterprise like Elon Musk to build SpaceLink. We see countless energy generating ways from startups but none that is going new ways in geothermal energy that creates petawatts of energy and serves the whole planet – despite the fast that we have nuclear fusion inside our earth’s core that generates energy 24×7 no matter weather it is day or night, cloudy or sunny, hot or cold, dusty or calm. Humans still kill each other despite the fact that we have AI systems that could analyze every aspect of propaganda, conspiracy, fake news and so fort that would identify the traces to the group instantiating a war. We know we could somehow build space elevators to avoid rocket launches and get to other planets much easier. We know we can split carbon from oxygen and decarbonize air yet it is not done in large scale. Those are the problems enterprises can and will solve in the future. It’s not even a question of time it is already starting.
Summary
Understanding the inner working of an innovation process feels like 250 years ago after we understood the inner workings of mass production. It was mainly driven by the understanding of how to create motion and power on demand and at any time. It changed the world forever.
Today we are at the brink to understand the inner workings of innovation. It is mainly driven by the understanding of how our brain intelligently can solve problems of any complexity on demand and at any time.
http://bluecallomaiacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/EnterpriseAIAcademy-Logo-450-x-100-300x67.jpg00Axel Schultzehttp://bluecallomaiacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/EnterpriseAIAcademy-Logo-450-x-100-300x67.jpgAxel Schultze2026-09-08 19:14:502026-09-08 19:14:50Seven Things CEOs may consider about innovation, before expecting it from their teams
Seven Things CEOs may consider about innovation, before expecting it from their teams
BlueCallom CorpAfter 10+ years with significant improvements, lots of patents, and interesting novelties but no real breakthrough innovation, more and more CEOs wonder why. What is it that makes it so hard to deliver a disruptive innovation? They have invested so much in brilliant experts, scientists, and researchers but no innovation. They engaged with many startups – even acquired one or more, but there is no sign that it makes a difference. As a result, more and more innovation centers get closed. The past years could be seen as Innovation Winter for enterprises. At the same time, the number of Unicorns grew above 1,000 and counting, ready to disrupt different industries. Is that just the way it is? Absolutely not !!!
Innovation…
1) …can only be mastered when corporate leadership knows how to create it
2) …needs a purpose that states the importance of an organization
3) …needs a strategy for how to identify and create the unknown
4) …is one of the intellectually most demanding jobs
5) …requires a profoundly different organizational structure compared to enterprises
6) …requires different processes and KPIs to manage it
7) …has the potential to solve problems of any complexity, meaning any problem
1) Understand how someone creates Innovation
Innovation can only be mastered when corporate leadership knows how to create it – without becoming a technology expert or neuroscientist. Starting at ground zero: Ideas are created in the brain. Our brain cells deal with past experiences/sensations but cannot look into the future. And there is no random idea generator anywhere in our brains. Ideas get created by comparing and mixing those experiences, and humans have that sensational ability to imagine something new based on the mixture of experiences – we call that creativity. Neuroscience developed an excellent understanding of how our neurons connect to combine experiences we had or have in the very moment and create new virtual experiences. But even that is not random but based on stimulation. When stimulating our brain in certain sequences with specific methods, questions, impressions, and so forth, we now can purposefully create ideas that contribute to the solution of a problem – without any drugs. The same stimuli that top entrepreneurs had intuitively used without even knowing. Moreover, a team collaborating on solution development in a highly focused way will create a breakthrough solution in four weeks. Any additional time would not create any better ideas. Understanding that basic concept is enough to either learn more about it or task a c-level executive to take it forward. Having the concept is only the starting point.
2) Define your purpose of Innovation
The power of solving nearly any problem bears the question of what problem YOU will want to solve for your business and your customers and shareholders. An innovation team in a vacuum is as good or bad as having no innovation team. Why do you need innovation? To address a new market and grow the company? To compensate for declining revenue as a technology or industry segment, you serve changes focus? To solve a significant problem that is known, exists for a while, and nobody wanted to solve it because it is too hard? Remember JFK in the sixties stating when announcing to go to the moon: “We don’t do it because it is easy; we do it because it is hard.” Leading an entire nation to something significant is as hard as leading an enterprise to something great. Leadership is – and will remain to be hard. But survival as a follower is not much easier and far less rewarding. On top of all – you will only attract top talents when the challenge is: to make the impossible a reality.
3) Make innovation a mission-critical initiative.
Innovation must be a business strategy that defines very clear goals and the possible paths to get there. Knowing how innovation is created opens completely new opportunities. Defining those opportunities as goals and identify teams who can do it and leaders who can navigate them is a key part of the strategy. That strategy would result in an Executive Innovation Mandate, stating the Significance, Scope, and Magnitude of the innovation the executives are looking for. Today, a team may get very excited about a business opportunity with a 50 Million revenue potential, but in a 50 Billion enterprise, that would represent 0.1% revenue contribution. And if it is necessary to replace a 5 billion business unit focused on combustion engine technology, a new tool for bicycle repair would not mean anything. The innovation strategy, however, remains a different beast than any other business strategy. This mainly because we don’t want to follow any random idea, where we don’t know the outcome, but a problem that we jet have to identify. Hence, an Innovation Meta Strategy is an umbrella strategy that leads to INNOVATION as a result and not to a specific solution. Craft the meta strategy as a guidance mechanism that includes general objectives, the way to identify solutions for problems, that are relevant to the company, and their customers. And yes constraints are ok. Infinite openness is a myth because our brain can hardly deal with it.
Let the team know the expectations instead of experimenting in the dark.
4) Attract teams with innovation-relevant cognitive abilities.
Innovation is one of the intellectually most demanding jobs. Why do more startups fail than win? Lots of theories are out there. The most simplified yet essential rule is “top teams make something out of nothing.” This follows the question of what those top teams have that the others don’t. Warning: Degrees, certificates, and titles make no difference at all. Remember: the most successful startups are dropouts. Curiosity, Courage, Creativity, Clairvoyance and Collaboration… are some of the top eight cognitive abilities an innovation Dream Team needs to have.
Make 100% sure that the innovation teams do not get distracted with other tasks. IN many cases just a small job will through their brainwork off for days. Having part time innovators is a guaranty for failure. And putting people in their just because they want to is a risk. Ensure their ability and the background for the team composition is a match.
You will be surprised to hear that most enterprises with more than 1,000 employees have those talents already today – but not a single one is involved in innovation. Experts like scientists, engineers, physicists, biologists and so forth are ok to have one in the team but they need to do something that is extremely hard: forget what they learned and be rightfully proud of and question their own work. So, why torture them?
5) Allow an Innovation relevant Organization
Your enterprise works because your employees learned to leverage the processes you have and don’t wonder every day how to improve them and try something different. If there is a need for change it must be coordinated across larger parts of the enterprise. Forget to make your enterprise more entrepreneurial. You would be bankrupt before you even see a beginning of a change. An enterprise works every single day because of its hyper-detailed processes. No room for error, and zero experimentation.
An innovation team however, need to question each and every aspect of a product, a sales process, or the customer experience, to make an innovation a breakthrough for its target audience. Innovation teams are small and extremely fast. If they need something they need it now – not based on processes, time or budget requests. Managers need to know the budget by hard and what they spent so far to make a decision on the spot. Innovation teams need to reach out to selected customers any time and not wait for a response from a sales organization that is in a critical deal. Go-to-market methods need to be tested without requiring the blessing from brand marketing, PR and others. Of course an innovation team may need to live with some constraints in order to leverage the available resources, but all that must be clear ahead of time not under way.
Your Innovation Dream Team WANTS to make the impossible a reality. To do so they live in the most competitive environment – competing with the rest of the world. The innovation culture will need to reflect that. A lego playground is the last thing true innovators want to see. Innovation teams work under extreme conditions – against time, budgets, and other innovators, where new pop up every morning. For them it is all about relentless execution.
6) Introduce innovation success-relevant processes
Most innovation teams will threaten you to leave the company if you come up with management, processes, KPIs, or even constraints on what to innovate. It’s OK to let them find other opportunities. No Unicorn on earth has been built like that. Every innovation we have today took more than five years to be globally recognized and ten years to become a dominant player in its industry. This Innovation-Market-Dynamic dictates timing more than anything else. Innovation opportunity discovery, problem validation, deep-dive into neuro ideation, innovation summit, solution validation, innovation financing, solution building, innovation-to-market, exponential growth, and finally, global innovation scaling are all distinct processes that can’t be found anywhere in any global enterprise. Those process elements also generate tens of thousands of data points and feed an intelligent KPI Framework. One of the biggest problems of the past was the step-by-step experimentation. Lets do this and then see how it is going. Innovation needs a holistic view to understand it and build it in a way that the outcome is in the DNA of every step of the way. Always keep in mind: There is a reason why the Fortune 5,000 companies around the globe were unable to bring a breakthrough innovation to market.
7) Re-design our enterprise for a future of large scale innovation.
Today enterprises seem to run behind startups, see them as the biggest competition, more agile, a threat and something hard to grab. And those startups do deserve all our full respect for the solutions they build. Yet, there is also a significant limitation to the type of problems they can solve. We have seen a dozens of startups try to push mini satellites to space for all kinds of purposes. But it took an enterprise like Elon Musk to build SpaceLink. We see countless energy generating ways from startups but none that is going new ways in geothermal energy that creates petawatts of energy and serves the whole planet – despite the fast that we have nuclear fusion inside our earth’s core that generates energy 24×7 no matter weather it is day or night, cloudy or sunny, hot or cold, dusty or calm. Humans still kill each other despite the fact that we have AI systems that could analyze every aspect of propaganda, conspiracy, fake news and so fort that would identify the traces to the group instantiating a war. We know we could somehow build space elevators to avoid rocket launches and get to other planets much easier. We know we can split carbon from oxygen and decarbonize air yet it is not done in large scale. Those are the problems enterprises can and will solve in the future. It’s not even a question of time it is already starting.
Summary
To hear more about this topic, ask questions or enter the discussion,
Join us on Dec 7, to our innovation thought leader webinar Your CEO’s Innovation Expectation
https://dev.bluecallom.com/your-ceos-innovation-expectations/
In any case, I would love to hear your opinion about the characteristics of innovative solutions or companies.
I’d love to hear your thoughts