Driving Innovation: Enabling Managers to Educate Leaders on What Innovation Really Takes
Live Webinar 28th July, 10am – find the summary and recording here.
The Innovation Disconnect
Senior leaders demand innovation. They want breakthrough solutions, competitive advantages, and transformational growth. So they turn to managers and say: “Drive innovation in your teams.” Then they wonder why innovation initiatives fail, innovation labs produce nothing scalable, and their organisations remain stuck in incremental improvements.
The problem isn’t that managers can’t drive innovation—it’s that leaders don’t understand what innovation actually requires. They treat innovation like any other deliverable: set a target, often don’t assign resources, yet expect results. But innovation isn’t a project—it’s a capability that needs specific organisational conditions to thrive.
Meanwhile, managers are caught in the middle, accountable for innovation outcomes without the authority or resources to create innovation-friendly conditions. They know what their teams need to innovate effectively, but they can’t articulate it in terms that leaders understand or justify it in language that gets budget approval.
The Manager’s Innovation Challenge
You understand innovation intimately. You see how psychological safety enables risk-taking, how cross-functional collaboration sparks breakthrough thinking, and how rapid iteration cycles accelerate learning. You know innovation requires time to explore, permission to experiment, and resources for multiple attempts.
But when you request these resources, leaders hear “inefficiency.” When you advocate for exploration time, they hear “lack of focus.” When you explain the need for failure tolerance, they hear “lowered standards.” The disconnect isn’t your innovation capability—it’s the translation gap between what innovation requires and what leaders think they’re buying.
You need frameworks to make the invisible visible and language that connects innovation inputs to business outcomes that leaders care about. You need tools to demonstrate why innovation can’t be rushed, why it requires specific investments, and how to measure its progress in ways that make sense to strategic decision-makers.
What This Webinar Delivers
This focused session with Culture Consultant and Co-author of Unlocking a Culture of Innovation, Cris Beswick, equips you with strategic frameworks to bridge the leadership understanding gap across three critical areas:
The Innovation System Components
What leaders must understand: Innovation requires three interconnected system elements that can’t be skipped or shortcut:
- Exploration capacity: Why innovation needs dedicated time for problem discovery and solution experimentation
- Learning mechanisms: How intelligent failure becomes competitive intelligence
- Resource allocation models: Why innovation budgeting works differently than operational budgeting
Measuring Innovation That Matters
Moving beyond vanity metrics to business impact indicators
- Innovation pipeline health: Measuring flow from problem identification to solution implementation
- Capability development metrics: How to track your team’s growing innovation capacity
- Learning velocity: Demonstrating how fast failure leads to better solutions
- Resource efficiency: Showing leaders the ROI of innovation investment
Incremental vs. Differentiated Innovation
The strategic choice leaders must make consciously
- Incremental innovation: Optimising existing solutions (predictable returns, lower resource requirements)
- Differentiated innovation: Creating new solution categories (uncertain returns, higher resource requirements)
- Portfolio balance: Why successful organisations need both, allocated differently
Your Leadership Education Toolkit
You’ll leave with concrete frameworks to educate your leaders about innovation realities and specific requests you can make with confidence. This isn’t about asking for more—it’s about helping leaders understand what innovation investment actually looks like and why it delivers the outcomes they want.
