Have we become too impatient to innovate?

Think about a company that claims to be “Shaping the Future Together” or “Powering Change for Tomorrow”.

Maybe they’re located “Where Vision Meets Action” while “Unleashing the Power of Potential”.

I often wonder if there’s a special school that trains people to write empty taglines like these.

There’s no shortage of such whacky claims, among companies of all sizes and across industries and geographies.

Yet the reality of companies’ commitment to bold, long-term investments in innovation stands in stark contrast to the bluster of their slogans. The correlation, if there is one, is most likely negative.

While annoying, this practice is also understandable.

Businesses are under constant pressure, from market forces and shareholder demands, to innovate with greater speed and impact.

This makes them chronically impatient.

So they feel the need to signal to the market that they’re in a hurry to transform their industry.

But the cruel irony is that this impatience imposes restrictions on these companies’ potential for innovation.

Ultimately, it harms them.

Meaningful innovation requires companies to adopt a long-term perspective, but most corporations are fundamentally structured to pursue short-term gains.

In this week’s article we’ll see how poor governance, weak portfolio management, distorted incentives, unforgiving quarterly reporting pressures and ‘innovation theatre’, all conspire to reveal a company's underlying impatience and limit its ability to innovate.

I. Chronic impatience

1. Governance as a barrier

As we know, innovation requires flexibility, a taste for frequent iteration, and a degree of risk tolerance that doesn’t sit comfortably with traditional corporate governance structures.

Companies typically design their governance (consciously or not) to protect existing operations. The focus is on stability, predictability, managing risk — all priorities that can clash with the needs of explorative innovation.

While these structures serve a role in keeping the lights on, they unintentionally stifle innovation efforts when they get applied to exploration projects in the same way. Which they all too often do.

In practice, this rigidity means that even when companies express a desire for disruptive innovation, their internal structures make it near-impossible to achieve.

If you enforce the same standards on both routine operations and explorative innovaton activities, governance becomes an invisible but permanently clenched brake on exploration.

Ambition is great, keep it coming!

But successful innovation demands more than statements. It requires governance that recognises the uncertainties that come with exploring new customers needs, new markets, new pricing models…

One of the main ways in which governance obstructs innovation is through lengthy approval chains. In too many organisations, new initiatives need to pass through multiple layers of approvals— boards, committees, senior executives, many of whom lack professional expertise in innovation.

These layers add time and complexity. They force hands-on innovators to spend less time speaking to real customers so they can keep risk-averse stakeholders happy.

As a consequence, they often abandon genuinely disruptive ideas in favour of safe, predictable ones.

This creates an overall ‘watering down’ of innovation potential. High-potential ideas become diluted with each passage through a layer of corporate bureaucracy.

Compliance standards, built for mitigating risks in the core business operations, frequently get misapplied to new projects that involve inherent uncertainty.

Yet Instead of empowering innovation teams to explore, the powers-that-be impose all kinds of checks and balances – that give the illusion of control, but in reality do little more than constrain creativity.

Combine these hurdles with conservative decision-making panels and it’s inevitable that projects with clear, immediate payoffs receive more funding than more risky but potentially transformative ideas.

As a result, it’s fair to say that governance holds the responsibility for the lack of impact of the company’s innovation portfolio.

The consequence of this approach is that the organisation will always prioritise continuity over exploration.

Innovation becomes more about minimising disruption than encouraging it or benefiting from it.?

Innovation teams –even the ones hired to “disrupt”– find themselves peddling incremental improvements rather than transformative ideas.

In organisations with such ill-adapted governance for long-term innovation, the potential for breakthrough advancements is systematically undermined.

Instead of creating an environment that celebrates risk-taking and creativity, these companies develop an atmosphere of caution, of conformity.

But governance isn’t written in the stars. Companies can achieve more meaningful innovation, if they’re willing to reimagine their governance structures.

The most obvious way of achieving this involves creating separate governance channels for high-risk projects and streamlining approval processes so that innovation teams benefit from greater autonomy.?

As I’ve argued before, implementing a clear Innovation Mandate is a simple and effective way of reducing ambiguity while delegating authority over innovation to professionals who know what they’re doing.

Until governance is aligned with the weird needs of innovation, large organisations will continue to struggle to achieve the bold ambitions they claim to hold.

2. A Portfolio of quick wins: a sign of impatience

What’s the correct way to balance an innovation portfolio?

Every company is different, but in most cases an effective portfolio should strike a balance between short-term, incremental projects and high-potential, longer-term ventures.

With this mix in mind, I recommend companies take a Real Options approach to their innovation portfolio.

Though I explained Real Options in some depth in a previous edition of this newsletter , the short version is that they offer companies the flexibility to pursue high-uncertainty projects without fully committing today to scaling them prematurely.

Real Options thinking allows an organisation to invest in explorative projects with the option to expand, pivot, or abandon them based on how they evolve.

This approach gives your innovation teams room to learn and adapt. It ultimately helps a company manage the risks associated with ambitious projects without being forced into an all-or-nothing decision-making framework.

Real Options are the antithesis of the “bet the ranch” school of investing in innovation.

However, most corporate decision-makers seem to be unfamiliar with Real Options. Instead, they seek out short-term “quick wins” that provide predictable returns.

This tends to go hand-in-hand with a preference for low-risk, incremental improvements, as opposed to explorative, transformative ventures.

Don’t get me wrong, this bias for incremental innovation is often justified. It tends to be driven by real pressures to show immediate gains now, not potential gains next year.

So it’s only logical that this which leads to a portfolio composed mostly of projects that are easy to measure and sell to stakeholders. So what if their impact is limited?

Well, we’ll see in a minute.

Whereas a Real Options approach provides room for adaptation and significant growth, most companies limit themselves and end up with a portfolio stuffed with minor upgrades and enhancements.

Yes these are safe bets that can be executed quickly, but their impact is going to be lacklustre.

This focus on quick wins is deadly for an organisation’s innovation capacity.

With a portfolio that leaves out the option to pursue more speculative projects, companies lose out on the really juicy opportunities.

Portfolios overloaded with short-term initiatives ultimately result in diminished potential, as the organisation becomes locked into a cycle of small, repetitive gains.

It becomes a set of short-lived achievements, severely limiting the company’s ability to adapt and thrive in a dynamic market.

So why don’t companies just get it right? Where does the impatience and short-sightedness come from?

Part II: a Culture of Impatience

3. Incentives tell the real story

Most companies love to proclaim their commitment to long-term innovation.

But the incentives they offer provide a much more honest picture of their true priorities.

Incentives shape behaviour.

If rewards are tied to short-term achievements, then of course employees will naturally focus on projects with immediate payoffs, rather than cool ideas that might yield amazing results in future.

So we can think of the incentive structure as a transparent gauge of any company’s patience (or lack thereof).

It shows, in crystal-clear terms, whether it values exploration and long-term thinking or merely pays lip service to these ideals.

What do your company’s incentives say about its true commitment to innovation?

In almost every organisation I’ve encountered, incentive structures are misaligned with the needs of innovation.

Annual bonuses, performance metrics tied to quarterly (or at best annual) outcomes, promotions based on measurable factors… They all steer employees toward low-risk, incremental initiatives.?

Short-term incentives like these create a culture where quick results take priority.

Experimental, uncertain work might sound cool, but it’s not truly valued.

Consequently, high-potential projects that require patience and some sustained effort struggle to get the attention they need.

Employees are mostly rational. They’re aware that their success hinges on meeting near-term targets, so only in rare cases do they push for projects that challenge the status quo.

For innovation professionals (and transformation professionals more broadly), incentives serve as a crucial indicator of the company’s genuine appetite for long-term change.

Sure, mission statements and strategy briefings might suggest a commitment to innovation. But the reality is better understood by observing where the company directs its actual rewards.?

Recognising these signals is a first step in enabling us to push for adjustments in the incentive structure.

Ultimately though, leaders within serious organisations should advocate for rewards that support patient, exploratory work.

As mentioend, incentives shape behaviour. So effecting a shift in incentives –to align with long-term innovation goals– can be one of the most powerful levers for creating a culture of innovation that values authentic, long-term, sustainable innovation.

4. The quarterly clock is always ticking

In most big companies, particularly listed ones, the drive to deliver quarterly results puts huge pressure on every department.

Innovation teams don’t seem to escape this pressure, which can seem odd since their focus is supposed to be much longer-term.

Even though regular financial updates are apparently essential for investors and stakeholders, they impose artificial deadlines on innovation projects that in fact need time to develop and mature.

This constant push for quarterly progress forces innovation teams to artificially adjust their timelines. They might feel the irrational need to speed up or cut corners to show immediate results, even if it compromises the project’s long-term potential.

To meet these short-term reporting needs, I’ve seen innovation projects get scaled prematurely. Others get shelved entirely if they can’t demonstrate value fast enough.

It’s important for companies to realise that this creates the illusion of progress – not real progress.?

Projects get selected, adapted, discarded – based less on their strategic importance than on how well they flatter certain numbers within the financial calendar.

Initiatives that might lead to breakthrough innovations, given some time, get caught up in a cycle of proving their worth every quarter. Many get killed if they can’t deliver instant returns.

The quarterly clock stifles agility by locking innovation work into a rigid, short-sighted straightjacket.

When projects get prematurely scaled or abandoned, our companies miss out on learning opportunities.

It’s an approach that restricts innovation to what can be quantified and validated within a few months. Which inevitably erodes an organisation’s ability to explore ambitious ideas with long-term potential.

Yet for true innovation to thrive, companies need to protect some of their longer-term projects from quarterly pressures.

Sometimes we just need to create the space for more patience.

And adopt an approach that aligns with the complex, non-linear nature of breakthrough innovation.

Conclusion: This is how we end up with Innovation Theatre

Despite the grand ambitions many corporations announce for innovation, impatience turns these efforts into that most depressing of outcomes: Innovation Theatre.

Too often, the initiatives taken by large companies are visible but shallow.

They’re more about appearing innovative than achieving real breakthroughs.

Because when governance is too rigid, portfolios focus on quick wins, incentives reward short-term gains, and when financial pressures demand quarterly progress, genuine innovation gets squeezed out.

The result is an all-too-familiar cycle of minor, low-impact projects that sustain the status quo rather than challenge it.

This doesn’t mean companies aren’t capable of genuine, transformative innovation – far from it.?

But it does mean that meaningful innovation requires deliberate structural changes. In other words, flexibility, patience, and strategic risk-taking are things that need to be consciously designed.

By aligning governance, portfolio, incentives and timelines with a longer-term vision –you know, that longer-term vision that they claim to have anyway– companies can build an environment and a culture where real innovation stands a chance beyond the theatre.

For innovation professionals, the task is at the very least to advocate for these changes.

Push to create space for exploratory projects that might not yield quick results but can lead to real value over time.

Before joining a new company for example, instead of asking what your future employer says about innovation, enquire about what it does, and how it does it.

Real progress will come when we challenge the structures that prioritise appearance over substance.