The Innovation Initiative

Looking Beyond the Frontier in a Lean Execution-Focused Enterprise

“People tend to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity.” - Jeff Bezos

The Main Idea

Software teams often find themselves stuck in a rut of risk avoidance. While stable and incremental delivery keeps the business humming, it can signal an imbalance between “sure thing” work and the bold efforts needed to spark innovation. Talk abounds about fostering a culture of innovation, but the gap between concept and reality is often too great a leap. Addressing this challenge requires a frank discussion about the natural tension between the status quo and change. The opportunity for non-linear growth is found in the disruptive surprises of discovery, around the edges of organizations where ideas collide, and from distant signals of the technological frontier. By rewarding team members who take the initiative and innovate, leaders can foster a more dynamic and risk-tolerant work environment. This will help start the flywheel of frontier skills development, longer-term thinking, and catalytic generativity. Introducing a balanced and manageable approach to innovation ensures a steady flow of new ideas into the delivery roadmap, improving the chances for success and competitive advantage.[1]

“We believe change only happens on the margin – but a lot of change across a very large margin can lead to big outcomes.” Marc Andreessen, from The Techno Optimist Manifesto

Why Innovate?

Innovation is a deliberate act of driving growth and creating value through strategic differentiation, technological advancement, and operational excellence. Information arbitrage[2]?(brokerage) occurs when someone creates value by transporting an idea across the boundaries between formerly siloed domains. By mapping this imported idea to the challenges of the new organization, disruptive value and pie-enlarging opportunity can emerge.[3]?Study after study shows that more innovative companies grow faster, produce higher shareholder returns, and have higher future earning potential.[4]?Beyond these market benefits, innovators develop greater skills mastery by problem solving at the frontier of their knowledge. Innovative idea brokers tend to receive higher compensation, greater recognition, and more significant responsibilities compared to their peers.[5]

Innovation Requires Making Connections

While innovation is often perceived as a stroke of generative genius, it is more often a matter of paying close attention to information from other contexts. Valuable ideas are out there; but we need to venture beyond our usual stomping grounds to harvest them. It is the delivery of information perceived as novel into a new context that brings the potential for value creation. Ronald Burt, Professor of Sociology and Strategy Emeritus at the University of Chicago, said it best in his 2004 research:

“Stories about the creation of a good idea are often heroic, distinguishing exceptional people from the mundane. The creator is attributed with great intellectual ability, a fresh perspective, a productive way of thinking, a creative personality, or some other quality that enabled him or her to generate the?good idea… The brokerage value of an idea resides in a situation, in the transaction through which an idea is delivered to an audience; not in the source of the idea, nor in the idea itself… People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius. It is creativity as an import-export business.”[6]

With ideas ready to be plucked from a tree in one orchard and planted in another, let’s get down to the business of making sure the best of these ideas survive the cold and calculated constraints of your team’s project prioritization process. How can ideas find their place in the roadmap when the daily grind plows forward?

The Daily Grind vs. the Unimagined Future

Technology product development leaders are necessarily obsessed with execution. Constant incremental improvement through delivery is the heartbeat of a software enterprise. There is a universally intense focus on the performance of the team in pulling the oars together as they iteratively sprint to short-term goals. Yet singular focus on the goals within immediate line of sight can crowd out imagining the unimagined. Leaders must both run the business and?employ methods to discover market-expanding opportunities. They must consider how emerging tech brings new options into view as well as dream up and prototype risky, high-potential innovations.

The Tension Between Creative Innovation and Product Delivery

There is a fair degree of skepticism that creativity could be remotely compatible with the rigor of business processes. Rigidity and imposing expectations hamper the creative mind. The approach of framing goals as broad, less bounded ideas results in more innovative results.[7]?Fostering a process where initial ideas serve as catalysts for exploration and iteration requires a different type of structure. During an idea’s nascent stage, concepts must remain malleable to provide space for taking risks, learning, and pivots. Later, as ideas make their way down the funnel to more refined solutions, more process rigor will drive the final delivery. The gears of creativity must ultimately interlink up with the gears of the business to get value delivered.

There is a constant healthy tension in a process of innovation, each elastically tugging away from the other. In one direction, we need unfettered and expansive thinking. In the other, we have time pressure to deliver impactful solutions that move the company forward amidst a blizzard of constraints. The business has specific needs, but the rigidity with which these are conveyed can inhibit novel and groundbreaking product solutions.

Innovation and Originality Constrained by Rigid Requirements

Time Pressure and Creativity

Research suggests that the impact of time pressure on creativity significantly depends on how leadership frames up the situation. The ability to have focus time, the perceived importance of tasks (context to the mission), and the amount of consensus required for decision making should be areas of leadership attention. An excellent 2002 study “Creativity Under the Gun” provides this simple but effective comparison in a 2x2 matrix.[9]?

Headwinds

Conflict is inherent in creativity in that it dares us to reconcile “what is” with “what could be”. There is predictable resistance to shifting the view of the world in the face of a novel or foreign idea. Innovation requires a defiance of established norms.

“The idea you start with is rarely the idea you end up with. It’s the stepping stone to what’s next.” - Rick Rubin

Institutional Conservatism and Silos

Risk Aversion?— A resistance to change can impede innovative pivots. Gradual and incremental improvement through product tweaking is the unwritten doctrine of most software product companies. There are few formal routes for theoretical and far-fetched ideas to be discussed or funded. The conservatism of the roadmap is well-founded when startups are burning through investment capital. Employee performance reviews typically focus on impact and don’t provide credit for new ideas that don’t gain traction, which disincentivizes risk-taking by rewarding “sure thing” deliverables. This holds back frontier skills growth and the tendency for boldness in technical staff.

Status Quo Inertia?— Innovation is a form of divergent adaptation which frequently requires tossing out the old way. The inventors and owners of “the old way” may resist change due to entrenched thinking and loss aversion.[10]?Inertia keeps teams stuck in their routines, which are both comfortable and often sufficiently incrementally productive. It also inhibits the introduction of ideas that can help boost growth.

"Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed.” — Sir Isaac Newton’s Law of Inertia, from Philosophi? Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687

The Maverick and the Majority?— The wisdom of crowds is real, but divergent thinking sometimes requires singular genius. The process of selling ideas often doesn’t favor introverts who are less likely to exhibit the pushy and noisy behavior required to be heard over the din of execution – especially in the face of a chorus of conservatism. It is sensible to have a diverse and collaborative “roadmap committee” evaluate well-developed ideas to make productization decisions. But this should include shifting the risk balance in the roadmap to allow space for exploratory work. By having a blended risk portfolio, wild ideas can find their way into work streams, even if they seem impractical or improbable at face value.

Banking the Failure Dividend?— A source of conservatism is the sting of a failed project.[11]?Yet serial failure often precedes an innovative breakthrough. Positioning failures as setbacks can weaken the resolve of the team and leadership. Leaders in a culture of adaptation reframe these moments as opportunities for value-creating learning. The collective insights from failed attempts is a valuable source of organizational learning. Discovery efforts frequently follow a path of trial and error, capped by a final push to a successful outcome. Research refers to this process as “pseudo-serendipity,” distinguishing it from happenstance luck. Psychologist and creativity expert Dean Simonton explains that through this, “a scientist discovers what he or she was looking for, but manages to do so solely via some unexpected route, and usually not without considerable ‘trial and error.’”[12]

Organizational Boundaries Create Silos?— Information arbitrage is a great source of innovation. Great ideas can be trapped inside an organization if there aren’t mechanisms in place to help share across teams.[13]?People should?frequently linger at the intersections of organizations to tap into the stream of potential ideas.[14]?Breaking out of the silo and building relationships across organizational boundaries can yield new friendships – and new ideas.

Balancing Exploration and Execution in Innovation

Helping innovative ideas survive requires a careful balancing between the ambiguous and exploratory nature of ideation and the structured, disciplined nature of execution. Leaders must navigate this tension to foster breakthrough ideas without slowing the operational engine of the organization.

Lock-In Effect and Premature Convergence?— The pressure to get a product to market can lock in ideas before they reach their best form. Sometimes the simple act of naming a thing constrains its potential. In pursuit of funding, innovators often face high expectations for structure and clarity, creating early commitments that can stifle risk taking. Prematurely formalizing nascent ideas might close the door on deeper iteration. Scientists in evolutionary biology and machine learning call this “premature convergence”[15]?which impedes optimal solutions and adaptability.

Ambiguous ideas need time to evolve and fulfill their full potential. Expecting early clarity can narrow creative exploration, locking innovators into choices that steer them away from alternate possibilities or more nuanced solutions.

To mitigate this, leaders must do more than merely accept ambiguity. They should actively encourage teams to dwell in uncertainty, iterate, and push creative boundaries.

The Boiler Room and The Ivory Tower?— Deep, critical thinking often requires quiet sequestration to imagine valuable new opportunities. Yet in most software teams, the same people who need that time must also solve day-to-day challenges, leaving little bandwidth for exploration. Time-slicing big ideas rarely succeeds, as research has shown that deep, uninterrupted focus is essential for fostering flow and innovation.[16]?We can infer from this that a two-week hackathon or quarterly innovation rotation would outperform one-day-per-sprint allotments for research and reflection. Product and technology roadmaps each demand multiple independent iterations yet must ultimately align. Timing is critical for seizing market advantage, but the moment may pass before the roadmap can accommodate a novel idea.

Lessons on Institutional Conservatism from Military History

A revealing historical example of institutional conservatism and distrust of disruptive ideas comes from post-WWI Britain. Prominent French and British military strategists including Charles de Gaulle, J. F. C. Fuller, and B. H. Liddell Hart had published works that reimagined the role of mobile armor in combat.[17]?To Europe’s great misfortune, both the French and British militaries rejected their provocative ideas. The German military elite discovered these published works and took note. The concepts formed the key tenets of the devastating German armor strategy of the Blitzkrieg.[18]

“We must conceive of the tank not as a mere auxiliary to the infantry but as the means of decision, to be employed in mass, at the key point, and in the pursuit of victory.” - Charles de Gaulle, The Future of War, 1934

Each of these strategists was well known to the German military as they formed their plans to pay revenge for the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles.[19] Recall that a precondition of innovation is to pay attention to the ideas in adjacent areas. The German military read beyond their own parochial boundaries. One of Hart’s more divergent ideas was that of the “indirect approach,” avoiding massed concentration and attacking vulnerable and critical points such as supply lines. This was utterly in contradiction with the leadership thinking of his time. Generations of?Clausewitz?disciples were taught to mass force for a decisive victory.[20]?Hart learned and adapted ideas taken from Spanish resistance during the Napoleonic Wars and Sherman in the American Civil War. His ideas became the foundations for counterinsurgency strategy which are still relevant today.

This brings us to an example of status quo bias coming from the French military preparations preceding WWII. Because static trench warfare dominated WWI, French military leaders assumed that defensive warfare would be the future's dominant mode, hence the tremendous investment in the 800-mile-long Maginot Line.[21]?This resulted in armed forces that were largely immobile and inflexible when WWII broke out. Because French leadership censored or de-emphasized any military publication that contravened the doctrinal dogma, there was no way a talented officer could take initiative.[22][23]?Germany’s response to the Maginot Line? They took the “indirect approach” and went around it. While this sounds obvious to our 2025 hindsight understanding, it was a radical departure that had few precedents at the time.

“If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek a solution elsewhere.” - Carl von Clausewitz, On War?(roughly 100 years before?the construction of the Maginot Line)[24]

“In war, as in life, sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way there.” - Liddell Hart, in Sherman: Soldier, American, Realist, 1929[25]

How can tech leaders avoid "Maginot Line thinking" in their technology roadmaps? The Maginot Line was an example of old thinking plus new technology. Innovation requires thinking about the future state of the world, not the previous state of the world. This means actively questioning assumptions, fostering adaptability, and considering how emerging trends may disrupt current strategies.

Help Innovation Thrive

By its very nature, innovation is atypical, even in the best of conditions. Leaders must create these conditions to encourage and support a culture of innovation. People require purpose-focused time, meaningful?urgency, minimal interruptions[26], and access to information crossroads.[27]

Creativity Requires Time. Decide and communicate how the most precious of your resources – time – is to be allocated. The regular grind creates pressure that prevents deep thinking and reduces creative output. This reveals a pressure paradox.?An environment of incremental deadline pressure serves the short-term needs of the business effectively. For example, the classic 2 week sprint/release cadence works well because it creates a clear boundary where delivery must happen. But extreme time pressure prevents exploration and doesn’t help spark novel and ingenious solutions.

Urgency with meaning?is a nuanced variation of this pressure and doesn’t have the same negative effects on creativity. Leaders must articulate how business goals are the purpose behind innovation. For example, innovations in operational excellence drive cost reductions that help the business sustain profitability. By linking the longer-term initiative that underpins a drive to discovery and innovation, context undergirds the goal.

Time-Slicing Kills Focus. Under high pressure without focused time, developers can feel distracted and frustrated, reducing their ability to think innovatively. Create conditions to sequester or otherwise isolate innovative team members from distractions and interruptions. Find the individuals in the organization that thrive in a mode of deep and quiet thinking. Ensure they know how to defend their schedules from interruptions. Research reveals that high time pressure environments create a feeling of time fragmentation, with creativity dropping on “high pressure days” and a “pressure hangover” after-effect which further saps employee creativity.[28]?

Wire Into the Product Delivery Process. The product roadmap competes for human bandwidth with numerous non-functional requirements such as infrastructure, product security, and moonshot technical innovation projects. Developing a process where innovative projects can fairly compete for the scarce resources available requires technical leaders to leverage the tools and techniques that convince product leaders of the value of projects. Incorporate prioritized and transparent roadmaps, a risk-reward matrix, and working prototypes. Delivering these with a cadence allows planners to imagine them working into a future planning cycle.

Know Your People. Talent alignment is a critical part of the solution. Some tech leads have fulfilling careers delivering incremental changes in the grind, while others enjoy envisioning and prototyping the next big thing. Others are hybrids that alternate to keep things fresh. These archetypes can coexist within an innovative software team.

Strategically Connect Silos. Superstar idea brokers tend to find each other without leadership assistance. These rare individuals often succeed despite the silos org leaders develop in the name of efficiency. By creating opportunities for key thinkers?to interact, you can foster an “import-export market” for?ideas.[29][30][31]?To support this, leaders can organize ideation sessions long in advance of planning. These sessions target key long-range strategic topics, introducing diverse free thinkers from far-flung teams to share ideas. To encourage information exchange, they can sponsor “This I Learned / This I Discovered” sessions where idea generators across the company present short 10-minute demos or ideas. These quick-hit sessions expose diverse groups to each other’s concepts, spark follow-up discussions, and encourage an informal exchange of insights that might otherwise remain siloed.

Reward the Taking of Initiative. In risk-averse and high-time-pressure cultures, promising ideas often wither before they gain traction. Research shows that public recognition of individual and team innovative efforts can motivate future proposals, even under pressing deadlines[32].?By acknowledging team members who step outside their boundaries to launch discovery projects or prototypes, leaders signal that taking initiative is valued. While “information brokerage” and generative cross-functional collaboration may not be listed in standard performance competencies, leaders who reward it underscore its strategic value.[33]?The organization reaps better retention, deeper innovation, and ongoing skills development in return.[34]

Conclusion

Innovative breakthroughs come from many sources. Serendipity and genius can’t be relied upon to deliver consistently. They emerge when leaders acknowledge institutional conservatism, carve out time for experimentation, and connect fresh thinking to real delivery. By balancing short-term execution with space for bold ideas, teams can enjoy a sustainable innovation culture that thrives on both discipline and vision.

References

Amabile, Teresa M., Constance Noonan Hadley, and Steven J. Kramer. "Creativity Under the Gun." Harvard Business Review, August 2002.

Andreessen, Marc. 2023. “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” a16z (blog), October 16, 2023.

Banholzer, Matt, Rebecca Doherty, Alex Morris, and Scott Schwaitzberg. "Innovative Growers: A View from the Top." McKinsey Quarterly, November 1, 2023.

Brownlee, Jason. "Premature Convergence in Optimization: How to Avoid It." Machine Learning Mastery.?Accessed January 1, 2025.

Burt, Ronald S. "Structural Holes and Good Ideas." American Journal of Sociology?110, no. 2 (2004): 349–399.

Burt, Ronald S. Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Cranston, John. "Contrasting Theories of Armor Development." Journal of Military History?73, no. 3 (2009): 841–870.

de Gaulle, Charles. Vers l’armée de métier. Translated as The Army of the Future. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1934.

Doughty, Robert A. The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–1939. Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1985.

Finkel, Meir. On Flexibility: Recovery from Technological and Doctrinal Surprise on the Battlefield.?Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Gallup. State of the Global Workplace 2022 Report. Washington, DC: Gallup Press, 2022.

GlobalData Research. "Do Innovative Companies Outperform?" Accessed January 1, 2025.

Hansen, M. T. “The Search-Transfer Problem: The Role of Weak Ties in Sharing Knowledge Across Organization Subunits.” Administrative Science Quarterly?44, no. 1 (1999): 82–111.

Hart, B. H. Liddell. Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American.?New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1929.

Hart, B. H. Liddell. The Decisive Wars of History. 1st ed. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1929.

Ibá?ez de Aldecoa, Paula, Sanne de Wit, and Sabine Tebbich. "Can Habits Impede Creativity by Inducing Fixation?" Frontiers in Psychology?12 (2021): 683024.

Mark, Gloria, Victor M. Gonzalez, and Justin Harris.?"No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems?(2005): 321–330.

Mearsheimer, John J. Liddell Hart and the Weight of History.?Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010

Mohanani, Rahul, Burak Turhan, and Paul Ralph. "Requirements Framing Affects Design Creativity." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering?47, no. 5 (2021): 936–947.

Parsons, Paul, Prakash Shukla, and Chorong Park. "Fixation and Creativity in Data Visualization Design: Experiences and Perspectives of Practitioners." In 2021 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 76–80. IEEE, 2021.

Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. New York: Black Irish Entertainment, 2002.

Shalvi, Shaul, Yoella Bereby-Meyer, and Rachel I. Schurr. "A Psychological Law of Inertia and the Illusion of Loss Aversion." Judgment and Decision Making?4, no. 6 (2008): 467–474.

Simonton, Dean Keith. "Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Whitlock, Flint. "The French Maginot Line: Its Full History and Legacy after WWII." Warfare History Network.

Endnotes

[1]?Banholzer et al.

[2]?Burt, Structural Holes

[3]?Burt, Structural Holes

[4]?Banholzer et al. 2023; GlobalData .

[5]?Burt, Brokerage and Closure

[6]?Burt, Structural Holes

[7]?Mohanani et al.

[8]?Mohanani et al., 6-8

[9]?Amabile et al

[10]?Shalvi et al.

[11]?Simonton

[12]?Simonton, 10

[13]?Finkel, 117

[14]?Hansen

[15]?Brownlee

[16]?Mark, 322

[17]?Mearsheimer

[18]?Cranston

[19]?Finkel, 62

[20]?Hart, Decisive Wars, 163

[21]?Whitlock

[22]?Doughty, 167

[23]?Finkel, 219

[24]?Clausewitz, Book 6, chap. 5

[25]?Hart, Sherman, 98

[26]?Amabile et al.

[27]?Burt, Structural Holes

[28]?Amabile et al.

[29]?Burt, Structural Holes

[30]?Burt, Brokerage and Closure

[31]?Hansen

[32]?Amabile et al.

[33]?Burt, Brokerage and Closure

[34]?Gallup