I’ve consulted on innovation programs at roughly 50 organizations over the past decade. The pattern is depressingly consistent: companies adopt innovation methodologies with enthusiasm, run programs for a year or two, and then quietly wind them down when results disappoint.

The methodologies aren’t the problem. The problem is how they’re applied.

The Methodology Trap

Let me be specific about what goes wrong.

Innovation theater: Companies adopt the artifacts of innovation - post-it note workshops, hackathons, innovation labs - without the substance. They’re performing innovation rather than doing it.

I worked with a financial services firm that ran quarterly “innovation days” for two years. Hundreds of ideas generated. Dozens of prototypes. Zero products shipped. When I dug in, I found that ideas generated in innovation days had no path to resources or production. They were entertainment, not process.

Methodology as substitute for judgment: Design thinking doesn’t tell you which problems are worth solving. Lean startup doesn’t tell you which markets are attractive. These methodologies are tools, but someone still has to make strategic choices about where to apply them.

I’ve watched teams diligently validate solutions to problems that didn’t matter. The methodology was followed perfectly. The output was useless.

Ignoring organizational reality: Most innovation methodologies assume you can build and test quickly. In reality, most organizations can’t. Legal review takes months. IT security takes months. Budget approval takes months. The methodology assumes a nimble organization that doesn’t exist.

What Actually Works

Here’s what I’ve seen work in practice:

Clear resource commitment upfront. Before you run any ideation process, define what resources are actually available - budget, people, executive attention. An innovation program without committed resources is a hobby.

The best innovation leaders I’ve worked with negotiate this upfront. “I have $2M and a team of 5 for this year. Here’s what we’ll do.” That’s real. “We’ll generate ideas and see what gets funded” is not.

Executive sponsorship with teeth. Someone senior needs to care about innovation outcomes and be willing to fight for them. Not just attend workshops and give encouraging speeches - actually clear blockers, protect teams from organizational antibodies, and make decisions.

One company I worked with designated a C-suite executive as “chief blocker-remover” for innovation projects. Their job was to intervene when organizational process was killing promising work. It sounds silly, but it worked.

Venture-style portfolio thinking. Internal innovation has similar dynamics to venture capital. Most things fail. You need a portfolio large enough that some winners emerge. But most companies run innovation like traditional projects - expecting everything to succeed.

Expect 70% of experiments to fail. Budget for it. Don’t punish teams for kills - punish them for not learning fast.

Integration paths defined upfront. Before you start building anything, understand how successful innovations get absorbed into the business. Who owns them after incubation? How do they get funded? What metrics determine success?

The companies that struggle have no answer to these questions. They build successful prototypes that have nowhere to go.

Realistic timelines. “Move fast and break things” is fine advice for consumer internet startups. It’s terrible advice for a bank or a medical device company or a defense contractor. Innovation in regulated, high-stakes environments moves slower. Plan for that.

The Middle Manager Problem

Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: middle management is often the biggest barrier to innovation.

It’s not because middle managers are bad people. Their incentives are the problem.

A middle manager’s job is typically to deliver against defined objectives with predictable outcomes. Innovation is, by definition, unpredictable. Taking resources from predictable work to fund unpredictable innovation threatens their ability to meet their objectives.

Until you change those incentives - either by explicitly including innovation in objectives or by removing innovation from their budget scope entirely - rational middle managers will quietly sabotage innovation efforts.

The solutions I’ve seen work:

Separate innovation funding that doesn’t come from business unit budgets. This removes the zero-sum dynamic.

Innovation objectives baked into manager evaluations. Not just participation (showing up to workshops) but outcomes (contributions to successful innovations).

Career paths that don’t penalize time on failed innovations. If working on a killed project hurts your career, people will avoid innovation work.

Matching Methodology to Context

Different innovation challenges need different approaches:

Core business improvement: Continuous improvement methodologies, kaizen, lean operations. Don’t overly formalize this - just build feedback loops into existing operations.

Adjacent innovation: Lean startup and design thinking actually work here. You’re extending into new markets or new products, building on existing capabilities. The iteration speed these methodologies assume is more achievable.

Transformational innovation: This requires different treatment. Longer time horizons, more tolerance for ambiguity, different success metrics. Stage-gate processes with venture-style checkpoints work better than rapid iteration.

Open innovation: Sometimes the answer isn’t internal development but partnerships, acquisitions, or licensing. Innovation methodology should include pathways for external engagement, not just internal building.

My Practical Recommendations

If you’re responsible for innovation at your organization:

Audit your innovation portfolio honestly. How many projects from the last two years shipped real products or generated real revenue? If the answer is close to zero, something is structurally wrong.

Follow the resources, not the activities. Are real resources actually being deployed against innovation? Or is it workshops and reports?

Identify the real blockers. They’re usually organizational (incentives, process, politics) rather than methodological. Fix the organizational issues before buying more methodology.

Shrink to win. Better to do a few things with adequate resources than many things with inadequate resources. Cut the portfolio to what you can actually support.

Measure outcomes, not activities. Number of ideas generated, workshops held, prototypes built - these don’t matter. Revenue from new products, costs reduced through innovation, strategic positions secured - these matter.

Innovation methodology isn’t useless. But it’s a small part of what makes innovation actually happen. Organizational design, incentives, resource allocation, and leadership attention matter far more.

If your innovation program isn’t working, don’t buy a new methodology. Fix the organizational conditions that prevent any methodology from succeeding.