By Coral McConnon
Executed early-stage innovation drains money, organisational bandwidth and engagement, but understanding how the brain thinks creatively helps organisations get it right and innovate smarter..
We live in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In this fast changing environment, the ability to innovate is no longer a nice-to-have. Yet the cost of getting early-stage innovation wrong is often underestimated. It drains money, time, and organisational bandwidth, eroding engagement and ultimately can undermine commercial relevance.
Getting early-stage innovation wrong is more costly than it appears
When early-stage innovation work goes right, it can be transformative: creating breakthrough ideas, energy, and ownership in the team, alongside real passion to drive future growth and often a new mindset towards innovation. However, when it goes wrong, there are substantial hidden costs.
First come the more visible direct costs: the money, time and resources spent on generating mediocre ideas. Then comes the inefficiency premium: the cost of resuscitating these mediocre ideas, and, if they’re launched, the additional investment they require because they weren’t well conceptualised in the first place. Next comes the opportunity cost: the headspace, resourcing and organisational bandwidth consumed by off-strategy work that could have been invested elsewhere, not to mention the innovation opportunities lost to more agile competitors.
Over time, repeated innovation cycles that are big on promise but low on commercial delivery also create cynicism and innovation fatigue. People become increasingly reluctant to devote scarce time, attention and energy to the next initiative.
And ultimately, there is a bigger cost still. History is littered with market leaders who failed to innovate as markets changed. Some lost their leadership position, others disappeared altogether. At its most extreme, the cost of failing to innovate is not simply a misspent innovation budget, but lost relevance, lost market leadership, and ultimately business failure.
Why do organisations keep getting it wrong?
Given these considerable costs, why does this keep happening? According to an HBR study, 96% of businesspeople recognise the importance of creative ideas but only 22% feel they harness creativity successfully. There is a creativity disconnect.
Why is this? Creativity is widely misunderstood and consequently stifled. Often, people think creativity is just throwing a few ideas around or having a bit of a brainstorm.
Creativity requires a disciplined, structured process that creates space for unstructured thinking. First get clear on the challenge you’re seeking to explore, then create potential solutions, and finally prioritise and sharpen those solutions.
However, for people who are inexperienced at deploying creativity, it’s easy to end up with an approach that’s either too structured (so it sucks the lifeblood out of the process) or to end up with something that’s wildly unstructured (and completely disconnected from commercial objectives and what’s truly in and out of scope).
Five ways early-stage innovation breaks down
In practice, this misunderstanding of creativity shows up five recurring ways:
- Focus is fuzzy — It’s not clear what good looks like or how we’ll get there.
- Thinking is shallow — There’s no time or space for quality thinking.
- Energy is low — There’s inertia, fatigue or lack of engagement.
- Perspectives are stuck — People default to business-as-usual thinking.
- Decisions kill ideas — The most promising (and perhaps slightly uncomfortable) ideas are swiftly killed off.
These challenges usually aren’t a people problem. They’re a design problem – what organisations protect, what they overload, what they make risky and what their decision processes quietly (or loudly) reward.
Designing for smarter early-stage innovation
The good news is that if these are design problems, they can be designed differently. Better understanding how our brains work when we think creatively allows us to identify the conditions that support smarter, more productive innovation.
Over almost 20 years, I have work on strategic innovation challenges with global clients. Alongside this, my MSc study brought together research on the neuroscience of creativity with interviews with neuroscience experts and innovation leaders. From this I distilled five principles that repeatedly make a difference.
Cognitive Focus: get clear on the challenge, what good looks like, and what is genuinely in and out of scope – and align stakeholders around it. Otherwise, teams can burn considerable creative energy solving the wrong problem or developing clever ideas nobody ultimately has the appetite to back.
Cycles of Deep Thinking: protect the time and cognitive space required for quality thinking rather than expecting breakthroughs from overloaded people between meetings. When our attention is depleted, thinking becomes reactive and conservative. Combining periods of focused effort with recovery gives the brain the space to incubate and make connections and ultimately produce higher quality thinking.
Creative Flow: create the conditions for engagement, energy, and ownership rather than treating innovation as another task to tick off. Psychological safety minimises risk and is an important foundation, but alone it’s not enough. The opportunity is to maximise reward with a sense of progress and momentum for people to stay engaged with difficult, uncertain work rather than retreat to safer, more familiar answers.
Challenging Reality: breakthrough ideas rarely come from looking harder at the same information through the same lens. Change the inputs: introduce fresh perspectives, challenge familiar assumptions and help teams move beyond recycled business-as-usual thinking.
Courageous Choices: agreeing what good looks like before ideas are judged helps teams make bolder, better-informed choices and build conviction around the strongest opportunities, rather than allowing decision making biases, shifting criteria or arbitrary stakeholder preferences to derail them.
Innovating smarter
In a VUCA world, organisations need to be able innovate with confidence and that starts with harnessing creativity. Poorly designed early-stage innovation doesn’t simply waste project budgets. It consumes organisational capacity, erodes engagement, and can leave businesses less able to adapt. Get the conditions right and you waste less time on mediocre ideas, give stronger ideas a better chance of surviving and turn creativity into a strategic capability for smarter innovation – generating ideas that drive growth.
Coral McConnon
