by Robyn Bolton | Jan 29, 2025 | Innovation
Innovation has always had its problems. It’s a meaningless buzzword that leads to confusion and false hope. It’s an event or a hobby that allows executives to check the “Be innovative” box on shareholders’ To-do lists. It’s a massive investment that, if you’re lucky, is break-even.
So, it should be no surprise that interest and investment have dried up to the point that many have declared that innovation is dead.
If you feel an existential crisis coming on, you’re not alone. Heck, I’m about to publish a book titled Unlocking Innovation, which, if innovation is dead, is like publishing “Lean Speed: How to Make Your Horse Eat Less and Go Faster” in 1917 (the year automobiles became more prevalent than horses).
But is innovation really dead?
Yes, innovation is dead.
The word “innovation” is dead, and it’s about time. Despite valiant efforts by academics, consultants, and practitioners to define innovation as something more than a new product, decades of hype have irrevocably reduced it to shiny new objects, fun field trips and events, and wasted time and money.
Good riddance, too. “Innovation” has been used to justify too many half-hearted efforts, avoidable mistakes, and colossal failures to survive.
Except that it is also very much not dead.
While the term “innovation” may have flatlined, the act of innovating – creating something new that creates value – is thriving. AI continues to evolve and find new roles in our daily lives. Labs are growing everything from meat to fabric to new organs. And speaking of organs, three patients in the US received artificial hearts that kept them alive long enough for donor hearts to be found.
The act of innovation isn’t dead because the need for innovation will always exist, and the desire to innovate – to create, evolve, and improve – is fundamentally human.
Innovation is metamorphosing (yes, that’s a real word)
Like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, innovation has been inching along, gobbling up money and people, getting bigger, and taking up more space in offices, budgets, and shareholder calls.
Then, as the shock of the pandemic faded, innovation went into a chrysalis and turned to goo.
Just as a caterpillar must break down completely before becoming something new, we’re watching the old systems dissolve:
- Old terms like innovation and Design Thinking were more likely to elicit a No than a Yes
- Old structures like dedicated internal teams and “labs” were shut down
- Old beliefs that innovation is an end rather than a means to an end faded
This is all good news. Except for one tiny thing…
We don’t know what’s next
Humans hate uncertainty, so we’re responding to the goo-phase in different ways:
- Collapse in defeat, lament the end of human creativity and innovation, and ignore the fact that cutting all investment in creativity and innovation is hastening the end you find so devastating
- Take a deep breath, put our heads down, and keep going because this, too, shall pass.
- Put on our big kid pants, muster some courage, ask questions, and start experimenting
I’ve been in #2 for a while (with brief and frequent visits to #1), but it’s time to move into #3.
I’ll start where I start everything – a question about a word – because, before we can move forward, we need a way to communicate.
If innovation (the term) is dead, what do we use instead?
We’ll explore answers in the next post, so drop your words and definitions in the comments.
by Robyn Bolton | Jan 27, 2025 | Podcasts
by Robyn Bolton | Jan 22, 2025 | Innovation, Leadership, Metrics, Stories & Examples
“Consider this question: If workers are hobbled by 1,000 rules, does it make a meaningful difference to reduce them to only 900?”
The answer is No. In fact, this is precisely why most attempts at fighting bureaucracy fail – and why true transformation requires starting completely fresh.
Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, knows this and isn’t afraid to admit it. When he took the helm in June 2023, he discovered a company paralyzed by bureaucracy. Instead of trying to optimize the system, he looked at the company’s “1,362 pages” of employee rules and knew the entire structure needed to change.
Breaking the Stranglehold
As Anderson stated in Fortune, “There was a time for hierarchical, command-and-control organizations – the 19th century, to be exact, when many workers were illiterate, information traveled at a snail’s pace, and strict adherence to rules offered the competitive advantage of reliability.”
The modern reality is different. Today’s Bayer employs highly skilled experts, operates at digital speed, and competes in markets where, as Anderson observes, “the most reliable companies are the most dynamic.”
The challenge wasn’t just the encyclopedic rulebook. The organization’s “12 levels of hierarchy” created what Anderson called “unnecessary distance between our teams, our customers, and our products.” In today’s innovation-driven market, this industrial-age structure threatened the company’s future.
Unleashing Innovation
Anderson’s solution? “Dynamic Shared Ownership” – a radical model that puts 95% of decision-making in the hands of the people actually doing the work. Instead of annual budgets and endless approvals, self-directed teams work in 90-day sprints with the autonomy to make real-time decisions.
The results are already showing. Take Vividion, Bayer’s independently operated subsidiary. Operating in small, autonomous teams, they went from FDA approval to first patient dosing in just six weeks. They’re now on track to produce one or two new drug candidates for clinical testing every year.
Speed Becomes Reality
The impact extends across the organization. Bayer’s scientists have transformed their plant breeding process, reducing cycles from “five years down to merely four months.”
In the consumer health division, teams have accelerated their development timelines significantly, reducing product launch schedules “by up to nine months” in Asia. Within their first two months under the new system, these teams generated millions in additional value.
While financial markets remain uncertain about this transformation, one crucial metric suggests it’s working: employee retention has improved. The scientists, researchers, and product developers – the people doing the innovative work – are showing their confidence in this dramatic shift toward autonomous operation.
Why This Matters & What to do Next
For most of us, the question isn’t whether our organization has too much bureaucracy – it almost certainly does. The question is: what are you going to do about it?
Try this – Create a small, autonomous team with a 90-day mission. Give them real decision-making power and see what they can accomplish when freed from bureaucratic constraints.
Remember Anderson’s key insight: reducing rules from 1,000 to 900 won’t create meaningful change. Real transformation requires the courage to fundamentally rethink how work gets done.
For anyone who’s ever felt the soul-crushing weight of bureaucracy, Bayer’s radical reinvention offers hope. Maybe the path to innovation isn’t through better rules and processes, but through the courage to trust in human potential.
by Robyn Bolton | Jan 21, 2025 | Podcasts
by Robyn Bolton | Jan 15, 2025 | Innovation, Leadership, Stories & Examples
I firmly believe that there are certain things in life that you automatically say Yes to. You do not ask questions or pause to consider context. You simply say Yes:
- Painkillers after a medical procedure
- Warm blankets
- The opportunity to listen to brilliant people talk about things that fascinate them.
So, when asked if I would like to attend an Executive Briefing curated by MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program, I did not ask questions or pause to check my calendar. I simply said Yes.
I’m extremely happy that I did because what I heard blew my mind.
Lean is the enemy of learning
When Ben Armstrong, Executive Director of MIT’s Industrial Performance Center and Co-Lead of the Work of the Future Initiative, said, “To produce something new, you need to create a lot of waste,” I nearly lept out of my chair, raised my arms, and shouted “Amen brother!”
He went on to tell the story of a meeting between Elon Musk and Toyota executives shortly after Musk became CEO. Toyota executives marveled at how quickly Tesla could build an EV and asked Musk for his secret. Musk gestured around the factory floor at all the abandoned hunks of metal and partially built cars and explained that, unlike Toyota, which prided itself on being lean and minimizing waste, Tesla engineers focused on learning – and waste is a required part of the process.
We decide with our hearts and justify with our heads – even when leasing office space
John E. Fernández, Director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, shared an unexpected insight about selling sustainable buildings effectively. Instead of hard numbers around water and energy cost savings, what convinces companies to pay the premium for Net Zero environments is prestige. The bragging rights of being a tenant in Winthrop Center, Boston’s first-ever Passive House office building, gave developers a meaningful point of differentiation and justified higher-than-market-rate rents to future tenants like McKinsey and M&T Bank.
49% of companies are Silos and Spaghetti
I did a hard eye roll when I saw Digital Transformation on the agenda. But Stephanie Woerner, Principal Research Scientists and Executive Director for MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research, proved me wrong by explaining that Digital Transformation requires operational excellence and customer-focused innovation.
Her research reveals that while 26% of companies have evolved to manage both innovation and operations, operate with agility, and deliver great customer experiences, nearly half of companies are stuck operating in silos and throwing spaghetti against the wall. These “silo and spaghetti companies” are often product companies rife with complex systems and processes that require and reward individual heroics to make progress.
What seems like the safest option is the riskiest
How did 26% of companies transform while the rest stayed stuck or made little progress? The path forward isn’t what you’d expect. Companies that go all-in on operational excellence or customer innovation struggle to shift focus and work in the other half of the equation. But doing a little bit of each is even more risky because the companies often wait for results from one step before taking the next. The result is a never-ending transformation slog that is eventually abandoned.
Academia is full of random factoids
They’re not random to the academics, but for us civilians, they’re mainly helpful for trivia night:
- 50% of US robots are used in the automotive industry
- <20% of manufacturing job descriptions require digital skills (yes, that includes MS Office)
- Data centers will account for 8-21% of global energy demand by 2030
- Energy is 10% of the cost of running a data center but 90% of the cost of mining bitcoin
- Cities take up 3% of the earth’s surface, contain 33% of the population, account for 70% of global electricity consumption, and are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions
Why say Yes
When brilliant people talk about things they find fascinating, it’s often because those things challenge conventional wisdom. The tension between lean efficiency and innovative learning, the role of emotion in business decisions, and the risks of playing it too safe all point to a fascinating truth: sometimes the most counterintuitive path forward is the most successful.
How have you seen this play out in your work?
