Innovation FAQ
These are real questions people put to Innovation Answers, answered by Gijs van Wulfen from thirty years of running innovation for organisations worldwide. Each short answer links to the full piece.
Winning management buy-in is one of the hardest parts of the innovation journey, and the place where most innovators fail not because their idea is bad, but because they approach senior managers the wrong way.
Killing ideas is one of the hardest moments in any innovation process, and one of the most mishandled. In my work with companies, I see two common mistakes: ideas are killed too early (by gut reaction, politics, or the reflex of a senior manager saying "no"), or they are never killed at all, leaving teams with a bloated portfolio that goes nowhere.
The biggest mistake I see teams make at the very start of an innovation project is diving straight into idea generation without a clear, agreed direction. They gather a room full of people, run a brainstorm, and produce hundreds of ideas that later get killed, not because the ideas are bad, but because nobody had aligned upfront on what they were actually looking for.
Testing your innovation concept with customers before building it is one of the most important, and most skipped, steps in innovation. What I see most often in manufacturing companies is that teams fall in love with their own concepts and rush to prototype or business case before ever showing the idea to a real customer. That is exactly where innovation budgets get wasted.
A Mini New Business Case (MNBC) is the professional, structured deliverable that carries your best innovation concepts from the fuzzy front end of innovation all the way to a management decision.
This is one of the most practical, and most ignored, budget questions in innovation. Most organisations underfund experimentation dramatically, and then wonder why their innovations fail at launch. Let me give you a straight answer.
This is one of the most important questions in innovation, and one where most teams get it badly wrong. They run a survey, ask customers what they want, and then wonder why the resulting product feels incremental and uninspiring. The reason is simple: customers can only tell you what they already know. They frame their answers based on what exists today.
Running a structured brainstorm well is one of the most misunderstood activities in innovation. Most teams jump straight into a free-for-all sticky-note session, walk out with 50 vague ideas, and then spend weeks arguing about which ones to pursue. What you need instead is a structured two-part process: a diverging stage and a converging stage.
This is one of the most common, and most demoralising, situations in corporate innovation. Leadership postpones, the team loses momentum, energy drains away, and eventually the project dies a quiet death. I see it constantly. Let me be direct about what is really happening and what you can do.
Diagnosing where innovation stalls in your organisation is one of the most important things you can do before spending a single euro on new ideas or processes. Without a clear diagnosis, you will keep treating symptoms rather than the actual cause.
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