From Blueprint to Boardroom Reality
When Derek Bishop, Jo Geraghty and I published Building a Culture of Innovation ten years ago, we made a deliberate choice: practicality over theory. The world didn’t need another conceptual book about innovation – leaders needed something they could put into action immediately. And our focus on real-world application clearly struck a chord, helping the book become an Amazon bestseller, earning the Chartered Management Institute’s “Management Gold” award, and leading to translations across multiple markets.
A decade later, one statistic continues to stand out: although 84% of senior executives say innovation is essential for growth, only 6% are satisfied with their organisation’s performance. This gap isn’t caused by a lack of knowledge – it’s caused by a lack of execution.
Innovation as an Effect, Not an Activity
Before going further, it’s important to clarify a foundational idea: innovation is not something you do – it’s something the market decides you’ve achieved. Innovation is an effect, a label customers apply when they experience something meaningfully better, more valuable, or more transformative.
No internal team can declare, “We’ve innovated”. That verdict belongs to customers alone.
The most successful organisations I’ve worked with understand this deeply. They don’t obsess over “doing innovation.” They focus on building the conditions where meaningful ideas can emerge, evolve, and reach the market. This shift – from activity to effect – changes everything.
Why the Original Framework Still Works
The principles we outlined a decade ago have only grown stronger with time. Research continues to validate what we saw in practice:
- Leadership ownership: Innovation must be championed at the top and reinforced throughout the organisation.
- Psychological safety: Amy Edmondson’s research continues to show that teams with high psychological safety are dramatically more innovative – 67% more, according to recent studies.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Organisations that break down silos see 21% higher profitability.
What separates high-performing innovators from the rest isn’t better processes – it’s the integration of process with mindset, behaviour, and incentives. Deloitte’s latest findings reinforce this: innovation programs focused only on process are 2.7 times more likely to fail than those that also address culture and leadership behaviour.
The Rise – and Failure – of Innovation Theatre
Many organisations have invested heavily in what has become known as innovation theatre: the visible trappings of innovation without the underlying capability. Innovation labs, hackathons, idea platforms, colourful posters – all activity, little impact.
The numbers are sobering: 78% of corporate innovation initiatives fail to deliver expected results.
A senior leader recently told me, “We’ve spent millions on innovation, but our core business operates exactly as it did years ago.” Sadly, this is not an exception – it’s the norm.
The Psychology Most Leaders Overlook
The missing ingredient in most innovation strategies is an understanding of human psychology – especially loss aversion. Our brains register potential losses at roughly twice the intensity of equivalent gains.
When leaders punish failed experiments or create environments where taking risks threatens career progression, they trigger the brain’s threat response. The result is predictable: incremental ideas at best, organisational stagnation at worst.
The Corporate Executive Board found that 60% of employees have withheld innovative ideas due to fear of negative consequences.
The conclusion is unavoidable: without psychological safety, innovation cannot happen.
Beyond Innovation Theatre: What My Work Focuses on Today
Working with executive teams around the world has sharpened my thinking. Three insights now sit at the centre of my advisory work:
- Differentiated Innovation
The innovation conversation is often framed as a choice between small improvements and radical moonshots. But the real competitive advantage lies in the middle – what I call differentiated innovation.
This is where organisations create meaningful distinction without the extreme risk profile of disruptive bets. Companies with balanced innovation portfolios achieve 3.5x higher shareholder returns over five years.
Apple is a perfect example: they rarely invent entirely new categories, but they consistently redefine existing ones.
- The Middle Management Multiplier
Middle managers are often labelled the “frozen middle,” but in reality they are the DRIVE layer – the group that turns executive ambition into operational reality.
My ODC Framework breaks this down:
- Executives OWN the innovation agenda
- Middle managers DRIVE progress and remove barriers
- Frontline teams CONTRIBUTE insights and ideas
The data is clear: organisations with strong middle management involvement in innovation are 38% more likely to succeed. One financial services client tripled their innovation output in 18 months simply by equipping middle managers to act as enablers rather than gatekeepers.
- Leadership Behaviours That Actually Matter
Innovation cultures are built through behaviour, not slogans. Three behaviours consistently make the difference:
- Vulnerability: Leaders who openly acknowledge mistakes reduce team threat responses by 74%.
- Resourcing experimentation: Bain & Company’s research confirms that meaningful investment in experimentation is a defining characteristic of serious innovators.
- Recognition: What leaders celebrate becomes cultural DNA. One pharmaceutical leader transformed their innovation pipeline by starting every leadership meeting with five minutes dedicated to learning from failure.
The Next Frontier: From Blueprint to Living System
If we were writing the book today, I would call it Building a Culture FOR Innovation. The distinction matters. Innovation is an effect – a label customers grant when your solutions create meaningful impact.
Our job as leaders is not to “do innovation.” It is to create the environment where innovation can emerge naturally and repeatedly.
If I were updating the framework today, I would add:
- Tools to help leaders counteract loss aversion
- A structured approach for scaling differentiated innovation
- Practical methods for activating middle managers as innovation multipliers
- Daily leadership practices that embed innovation into the organisation’s operating rhythm
The organisations that succeed in the next decade will be those that move beyond innovation theatre and build living systems where innovation is continuous, distributed, and deeply human. The upside is enormous – organisations that achieve this see 3.4x higher shareholder returns.
A Challenge to Executive Teams
As disruption accelerates, the need for genuine innovation capability has never been greater. But the answer isn’t more programs – it’s deeper leadership and a fundamental reframing of innovation itself.
Remember: innovation is an effect, not an activity. Customers decide what is innovative, not internal committees.
Three questions reveal whether you’re building real capability or simply performing innovation theatre:
- Are you measuring innovation by internal activity or by customer impact?
- Are you investing in experiments that could earn the innovation label from customers?
- When did your leadership team last publicly recognise learning from failure?
Your answers will tell you whether you’re creating the conditions for meaningful innovation – or simply rehearsing the performance of it.
Building a culture that enables innovation is challenging, but the alternative is irrelevance. Now is the moment to move beyond rhetoric and build the systems that make innovation possible.
Keep an eye out for the next book!
Previously published on crisbeswick.com.
How we can help
At Culture Consultancy, we help organisations drive growth and remain relevant by building aligning strategy, leadership, and culture so that innovation capability becomes embedded in organisational DNA. We offer tailored innovation capability & culture development programmes, working with leadership teams and people practitioners to identify what’s holding innovation back, and design the systems and behaviours that create the right culture for innovation. Built on diagnostic insights from our proprietary Assessment for Innovation Maturity and grounded in real-world transformation challenges, our interventions are always practical, evidence-based and directly aligned with your strategic priorities.
To find out more, book a call with one of our innovation culture experts.
About Cris
Cris is a global strategic advisor, keynote speaker, and bestselling author specialising in innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. With 25+ years of operational experience including a decade as an entrepreneur and former CEO, he brings ‘operational scars’ rather than just theoretical knowledge. He works with Fortune 500 clients such as Cisco, Novartis, and ING, as well as government organisations including GCHQ and the Dubai Government.
As co-author of the bestselling management book “Building a Culture of Innovation” and with multiple academic appointments, Cris has developed proprietary methodologies around measuring innovation maturity and building high-performing innovation systems. His work focuses on moving organisations beyond superficial innovation activities toward genuine cultural transformation where grassroots innovation enthusiasm aligns with senior-level organisational commitment.
