Your Organization Doesn’t Lack Ideas. It Lacks Pathways.

The real bottleneck to innovation isn't creativity — it's the missing route from a good idea to a funded one. Here's what that route actually looks like.

The Infamous Road to Nowhere

Every organization launches innovation programs. Almost none build the infrastructure that lets ideas actually travel — from where they originate to where they can be funded and acted upon.

Read this and let me know if it sounds familiar: The organization is launching an innovation program of sorts. The leadership really wants to see change. Everyone is hyped, feels included, and, finally, there is that promising wind of a long-overdue change. The hope is real, and the excitement of the launch event is too. Ideas get generated and collected – and then nothing happens. The six-month silence sets in. Perhaps a side note buried in a corporate intranet or marginal feed mentions that something was implemented somewhere. Not the big deal anyone has hoped for. – If this sounds familiar, please keep reading.

These ‘flavor of the month’ innovation programs, even with the best intentions, usually only produce one reliable outcome: disappointment for everyone involved and increasing fatigue and skepticism across the organization. It makes for an even steeper uphill battle for every innovation initiative that follows. - So, why do organizations fall into this trap over and over again?

Ideas need a Pathway – and the Barriers they hit Instead

It is not for a lack of great ideas. Creativity is not the problem. In my experience, great ideas actually are abundant in every organization I have ever worked with. The problem is a missing mechanism to safely and reliably collect, evaluate, select, and execute great ideas: Anyone with an idea needs a clear and reliable pathway to take an idea forward and get a realistic shot at making it happen without being at risk should the idea not work out.

Three Structural Barriers

So, what are the barriers that stand in the way of coming up with great ideas and getting them implemented?

Great ideas struggle with three structural barriers you find in most organizations for good reasons:

1. The Vertical Barrier – meaning ideas can’t travel up the hierarchy effectively. When a great idea from the grassroots tried to travel up the hierarchy, it usually end up in one of two states: it dies somewhere on the way as the organizational immune system responded with rejection, or it may actually arrive at a high level but got so diluted on the way by the many intermediaries who twisted and morphed the idea to match their own needs and beliefs, and to make it more appealing to the higher-ups. No matter in which state the idea turns out, the results are either a far cry from the original innovator’s intent or it just never arrives at all.
But the vertical barrier is not just hierarchy. It’s also threat perception and career risk by every potential supporter along the way.
So the question really becomes how you can connect people with good ideas at the grassroots of the organization with the decision-makers at the top of the hierarchy. Be assured, executives are looking for innovative ideas and have the means to support them. The idea does not have to die on the way and leave a discouraged innovator in its wake. The answer lies in building safe and robust pathways, as described in much detail in my upcoming book, The OrgChanger. For example, the Boehringer Ingelheim ‘School for Intrapreneurs’ (to be explored more in an upcoming article shortly) offered a forum and a safe development space for innovators based on merit only, connected them with experts and sponsors along the way, and gave them a shot to pitch their idea to the executive level in a safe and effective format. The approach was so powerful that it was later incorporated into the company’s formal Leadership Development program and got featured in the Ivey School business case study “Boehringer Ingelheim – Leading Innovation”, which has been taught in over 42 top business schools in at least 23 countries.

2. The Horizontal Barrier – organizations tend to organize into functional or regional silos for good reasons such as specialization and operational optimization within each silo. The problem is that the great idea usually lives between the silos and across functional areas of responsibilities, which -by definition- makes none of the siloed functions feel responsible for them. ‘It’s not my problem to address’ makes it nobody’s problem to address and, at best, leads to finger-pointing at some other function.
These horizontal barriers cost organizations the best ideas, which almost always live at the intersection of functions, and which require measures to cut through the walls that separate them. I will discuss several approaches over the next handful of articles, from structured approaches strategically aligned with the goals of the organization (e.g., starting a Business Resources Group, BRG) to informal and more serendipitous approaches such as the ‘Lunch Roulette’, so please subscribe to receive it as soon as it publishes.

3. The Talk-Doing Gap – it’s a tough barrier. While we like to talk about great innovations elsewhere, with famous examples from companies like Apple or SpaceX or alike, it drives inspiring conversation on ‘how we should innovate here’ in our own organization. But then, when we get back to our desk nothing happens. - Why is that? Because our organization’s culture is not supportive of the change the idea promotes. It is the company culture that suppresses action by making it risky to step up with a proposal. If anything goes wrong, it could easily lead to reputational damage and even translate to a career-limiting move - the organizational immune system can make sure of that with little effort.
If there is no safe pathway for even the greatest idea to flourish, inertia remains the safe bet. Changing the culture requires avoiding triggering an aversive response from the organizational immune system – which is why we will take a close look at the organizational immune system in my next article, so please subscribe to receive it by email as soon as it publishes.

Seeing Barriers are Opportunities

While the three barriers are just that, they also provide you with a clear starting point: each barrier is also a design brief — what exactly needs to be built to break through. So, once you have a good understanding of what the predominant barrier is (often enough it’s all three at once) you know what to address and how to approach building the safe structures that circumvent the organizational immune system, protect and support current and future innovators, and that will get good ideas in front of people who can make them happen. A key here is to seek out sponsors and supportive champions with distinct attributes to build a protective umbrella for your new idea pipeline. – We will look into building a powerful sponsor network in a separate article shortly.

I write more about building innovation that lasts inside large organizations in my forthcoming book, The OrgChanger. → Sign up to read the first chapter for free and get notified when ‘The OrgChanger’ book becomes available! - No Spam. Opt out at any time.