Innovation is easy. Making innovation successful is the hard part.
Over the years, I have seen countless innovation initiatives get crushed—not the big, moonshot ideas, but the small, everyday innovations that happen inside a software company. Scripts that automate repetitive tasks. Tools built to improve developer productivity. Side projects that someone genuinely believes could change the way things work.
Most of them don’t change the world. Many don’t even get adopted.
The result is predictable: disappointment, frustration, and eventually discouragement. Innovators start asking themselves, “What’s the point?” Over time, they stop trying.
What often goes wrong is not the idea itself, but how the idea is treated.
We tend to see innovation as an act of creation. Build something clever, present it to management, and hope it gets approved. But innovation—especially in large organizations—needs to be viewed through the lens of a product. You are essentially running an internal “Lean Startup,” and in that world, product–market fit matters. Adoption matters.
Misalignment on these dimensions is what causes innovation to crash and burn.
I have seen teams present ideas they believed were strokes of genius, only to have them criticized or shut down by senior leadership. From the team’s perspective, management “doesn’t get it.” From management’s perspective, the team appears to be diverging from the mission. This is where the friction of Opportunity Cost begins. Every hour a developer spends on an unvetted ‘side project’ that eventually will die, is an hour not spent on the core roadmap. Thus, draining company’s most expensive resource: engineering time.
And yet, I have also seen ideas gain traction and turn into real, successful innovations—sometimes even becoming growth opportunities for the team itself.
When you step back and observe why these ideas succeed while others fail, a clear pattern emerges.
Successful ideas are socialized early, at inception. Teams talk to key stakeholders before everything is figured out. They don’t present a polished, final plan—they bring a half‑baked idea. This creates space for feedback and shapes the idea collaboratively. In the process, you build influence by transforming stakeholders into participants rather than critics.
That shared contribution creates ownership. People begin to associate themselves with the idea and feel invested in its success—a classic example of the IKEA effect.
To reinforce this, the product is continuously built and showcased to these stakeholders. This allows you to implicitly validate the idea for three critical pillars long before a formal meeting:
- Desirability: Does anyone actually need this automation, or is it just a personal preference?
- Viability: Does this tool align with our current organizational goals (e.g., cost-cutting or speed-to-market)?
- Feasibility: Do we have the bandwidth to maintain this, or will it become ‘orphan code’ in six months?
By the time the idea is presented to a larger audience, the room already contains allies. The stakeholders who helped shape the idea now advocate for it. Through this collaborative journey, the idea is validated for product–market fit—long before it reaches a formal decision forum.
Through this collaborative journey, the idea is implicitly validated for desirability, viability, feasibility, and product–market fit—long before it reaches a formal decision forum.
That, more than brilliance or novelty, is the real success mantra behind winning ideas.