What Innovation Really Is and How to Do It Well

A friend once told me: “You work with innovation, so you must have many ideas.”
I loved that moment because it showed how easily innovation is misunderstood. Having many ideas is wonderful, but ideas alone are not innovation. If they were, every brainstorming session would turn companies into industry leaders.

Innovation begins with ideas, but it only becomes innovation when those ideas turn into something real that creates value for someone.

The misunderstanding that holds companies back 

Invention, creativity, and innovation are often used as if they mean the same thing. They do not.
Creativity is generating ideas.
Invention is developing something new.
Innovation happens only when a new idea or invention is implemented and used, by customers or internal teams, in a way that creates value.

A painful but honest example is war. Conflict has produced countless new methods, technologies, and strategies. They create value for someone involved, which technically makes them innovations. Yet they may not create positive value for society. This is why modern leaders must also talk about innovation together with ethics, long-term impact, and responsibility.

Innovation is more than outcomes 

Most leaders focus on the visible results of innovation.
New products.
New services.
New business models.
New processes.

These are important, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath every successful innovation lies a less visible but far more powerful engine: the innovation process. This process includes exploration, testing, argument, feedback, refinement, and difficult decisions about which ideas to abandon and which to advance.

And here is the part that many companies underestimate:
The innovation process is built on human interaction.

The human side of innovation 

Individuals make groups, and groups make organizations. Innovation depends on how these individuals talk to each other, challenge each other, debate ideas, and experiment. When people feel unsafe to ask questions, propose new approaches, or point out flaws, the innovation process quietly collapses.

Leaders often invest in tools and courses but forget that innovation lives inside human relationships.
If teams lack psychological safety, no tool will fix it. If leaders silence dissent, no hackathon will save the strategy. If employees fear mistakes, experiments will never happen.

Psychological safety is not a property of the whole organisation. It is a property of a group. Inside one company you can have pockets of high psychological safety and pockets of very low psychological safety. Some teams take risks, challenge each other, and experiment. Others play it safe and stay quiet. The difference is usually the leader who sets the tone for that specific group.

Why leadership is the foundation of long-term innovation 

Innovation is often described as fast, agile, and exciting. The truth is less glamorous.
Innovation is a long-distance sport.
It is the marathon that begins after the two-day workshop ends. Once the organisation has built the basic innovation capacity, it also needs a long-term commitment to strengthen this capacity through culture. Leadership must set the direction and create the conditions, but employees must build the innovation muscle from the bottom up.

That is why the responsibility lies with the leader. If employees avoid collaboration or stay silent, it is a sign that something in the culture is not working well enough for innovation processes to thrive. Before pushing harder on the innovation process, leaders need to understand why the culture is not supporting it and what needs to be repaired. Only then can the process function as it should.

It is difficult to guide ten people through change. It is exponentially harder to guide one thousand. That is why innovation requires patience, persistence, and a clear vision from the top. It requires daily habits, not heroic moments.

Relying on heroic moments creates the lone hero trap. One passionate individual steps in to save the project again and again while others remain uninvolved. This may produce short-term wins, but it undermines the long-term innovation capability of the organisation because shared responsibility never develops. Real innovation strength comes from collective effort, not from a single hero carrying the weight.

The two parts of a future-fit innovation system 

High-performing companies build both:

1. Innovation capacity
   This includes the processes, tools, frameworks, decision mechanisms, and structures that guide ideas from discovery to implementation. Capacity is the formal part.
2. Innovativeness
   This is the culture. The attitudes, behaviours, and psychological safety that allow the formal system to actually work. This is the informal part and it depends on leadership behaviour every single day.

Only when these two parts reinforce each other can a company innovate repeatedly and reliably.

Innovation does not happen in isolation 

Innovation does not happen in isolation, either inside the organisation or outside it. Even the strongest internal processes need input from the outside world. Companies that innovate well stay close to customers and spend time observing how people behave, not only what they say. They scan the market for weak signals and emerging patterns that others overlook. This mindset of continuous learning reduces the risk of developing solutions that look impressive internally but fail in the real world. Customer insight is not the job of a single department. It is a shared responsibility that strengthens the innovation muscle across the whole organisation.

The real work of innovation 

Companies that treat innovation as a structured capability outperform those that rely on luck or occasional bursts of creativity. When organisations build both innovation capacity and innovativeness, they experience higher adaptability, faster decision cycles, and better alignment between strategy and daily behaviour. They respond to market shifts earlier and with more confidence because they do not wait for a crisis to begin innovating. Their teams are already trained to observe customers, question assumptions, and experiment with new solutions. This creates an organisation that is ready for the opportunities of tomorrow instead of reacting to the problems of today.

If leaders want innovation that lasts, they must invest in both the system and the people. They must create an environment where individuals can contribute their ideas, challenge assumptions, speak honestly, and experiment without fear. They must make innovation a team sport.

The leaders who win the next decade will not be the ones with the loudest vision statements. They will be the ones who understand how innovation really works and who build the systems and cultures that support it. They will focus more on the daily behaviours that shape how people work together and see that innovation is a shared responsibility, not a project owned by a single department. These leaders will treat their organisation’s innovation muscle as a long-term asset worth training every day.

Innovation is not about having the right idea. It is about creating the right conditions so good ideas can survive long enough to matter.

That is what innovation really is.
And that is how to do it well.

Written by Barbara Salopek.