Every innovation begins with uncertainty. Certainty seeks answers, protects what is known; innovation begins with questions and explores the unknown. Organizations that want innovation must create the conditions for that exploration—giving people the time, trust and safety to challenge what is known and discover the unknown.
A few months ago, I read Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo, the pioneer of ancient DNA research and recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
What stayed with me was not just the scientific achievement of sequencing the Neanderthal genome. It was everything that came before it—the uncertainty, the frustration, the dead ends, the failed experiments, and the countless moments when the researchers had no guarantee that their next attempt would work.
The book made me think about something we don’t talk about enough when we talk about innovation: Where does failure fit into innovation?
Driven by curiosity, I examined several remarkable technological and scientific breakthroughs from the past decade. The scope of innovation is astonishing: from mRNA vaccines and CRISPR gene-editing tools to wireless brain-computer interfaces, advanced artificial intelligence, and large language models. Space exploration advances through the James Webb Space Telescope and reusable rocketry, and nuclear fusion research reach unprecedented milestones. But behind every one of these achievements lies a less glamorous story.
Failure. And lots of it.
For decades, nuclear fusion research faced ongoing technical hurdles before achieving recent breakthroughs. Similarly, SpaceX endured multiple launch setbacks prior to mastering reusable rocket technology. Many other landmark innovations have likewise overcame extended periods of trial and error.
The lesson isn’t that failure automatically produces innovation. It is that innovation requires an environment in which experimentation—and therefore some degree of failure—is possible. And that made me think about organizations.
We often explain innovation through familiar words: technology, talent, investment, strategy and leadership. All of these matter. But there is another question we don’t ask often enough: Does the organization actually have room to experiment? Because innovation rarely arrives as a fully formed idea. It usually starts as a question: What if we tried this?
Also, innovation doesn’t always require billions of dollars or decades of research. Sometimes it is a small improvement built on an existing platform. Consider Spotify. Some of Spotify’s innovations have emerged from combining existing technologies, data and product capabilities in interesting ways. Features such as ‘Spotify Wrapped’, ‘AI DJ’ combine generative AI, personalization and music recommendation to create a different way of interacting with the service.
So, why do organizations struggle to innovate? Perhaps the problem isn’t a shortage of ideas, but an environment that leaves little room for them to survive.
We fill every available hour with delivery
This is something I have observed repeatedly as an Agile Coach. Teams are often planned to almost 100% capacity. Sprint after sprint every available hour is accounted for. And then we ask: Why aren’t our teams innovating?
But innovation needs unallocated space. If every hour is committed to delivering today’s priorities, when does a team get to explore tomorrow’s possibilities? Continuous learning, experimentation and improvement cannot always be squeezed into the gaps between committed deliverables. Innovation needs to become part of the work itself.
We Say “Fail Fast,” But Do We Allow Failure?
“Fail fast” is a ubiquitous phrase in modern Agile and innovation discussions. Yet, true structural support for failure remains rare. When an experiment falls short, management may offer superficial reassurance, but the outcome frequently impacts performance evaluations and advancement opportunities—or, at a minimum, instills pervasive anxiety among employess. To counter this, organizations must establish clear, transparent policies that safeguard experimentation and explicitly protect employees from negative repercussions when initiatives fail.
We allocate budgets to innovation—but do we provide governance?
While many organizations proudly publicize their innovation budgets, financial investment alone cannot drive meaningful progress without proper scaffolding. In the white paper “The New SDLC With Vibe Coding,” the authors talk about the paradigm shift to team’s intent to build over the mechanics of implementation. Emerging AI language models and Agentic Engineering now enable teams to rapidly design, test, and deploy ideas. However, a critical gap remains: governance.
Effective innovation requires structured oversight to address essential questions—Who determines what to build? What frameworks guide these choices? Do the initiatives align with the organization’s vision and core mission? And ultimately, does this innovation serve a “Just Cause”?
We measure delivery far more carefully than learning
Agile organizations have become increasingly sophisticated at measuring flow. While these metrics effectively highlight system efficiency and work velocity, they fail to gauge an organization’s true capacity for innovation. To prioritize outcomes over outputs, Evidence Based Management (EBM) offers a comprehensive model structured around Key Value Areas: Current Value, Unrealized Value, Time to Market, and Time to Innovate.The objective of these metrics is to measure whether the organization has a learning system. Because innovation is ultimately a learning process.
Ideas need places to collide
Innovation rarely happens in isolation. One person’s observation can trigger another person’s idea. When the people meet outside their immediate delivery structures, many potentially valuable ideas gets connected. Organizations therefore need spaces where ideas can collide.
Innovation forums. Hackathons. Vibe Coding. Customer Challenges. Communities of practice. Experimentation days. Idea platforms. Cross-functional workshops.
And sometimes, simply a room where people can say: “I have an idea. I don’t know if it will work. But let’s try.”
Perhaps innovation needs its own infrastructure
We spend enormous amounts of time designing infrastructure for delivery: Product teams, PMOs, Release processes, Architecture boards, Quality processes, Metrics. But what about the infrastructure for exploration? What if organizations deliberately creates an environment for:
Time to explore. Budget to experiment. Permission to fail. Metrics that measure learning. Communities that connect ideas. Leadership that protects experimentation. A path from experiment to product.
That, to me, is the infrastructure for innovation.
Because innovation doesn’t happen simply because an organization tells its employees to “think outside the box.” It happens when the organization creates a system in which people have enough room to step outside the box—and provide enough psychological safety to discover that the first idea might not work. Innovation needs more than brilliant ideas; it needs an environment where people are willing to venture into the uncertain, learn from what they discover, and try again.
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