I’ve watched this movie play out at least a dozen times. Company announces a shiny new innovation lab. Big press release. Lots of talk about “fostering a culture of innovation” and “exploring emerging technologies.” Fast forward six months and the strategy team is pulling their hair out because none of the innovation work connects to what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
Another six months pass. Now the innovation team is completely demoralized because everything they build just sits there. Nothing scales. Two years in, leadership quietly winds the whole thing down. “Insufficient ROI,” they say.
The post mortem always lands on the same conclusion about innovation not delivering value. But that’s just treating symptoms. The real disease? It’s what I’ve come to call additive innovation. And in my experience, it’s killing more good ideas than bad execution ever could.
The Additive Innovation Trap
Let me get specific about what additive innovation actually looks like.
Additive innovation is when your innovation team looks beyond current roadmaps to envision what’s next. They’re exploring emerging technologies, building proofs of concept, imagining future possibilities. Then they take all that work and add it to plans that are already set. The innovation team operates with a “what’s technologically possible?” mindset instead of asking “what strategic outcomes are we actually trying to achieve?”
Picture this. Your innovation team has autonomy. (And they should, by the way. They need to move faster than the core business.) But somehow autonomy got confused with disconnection. So they’re off exploring new capabilities, running design sprints, building prototypes. Some of this work is genuinely impressive.
Then comes the handoff. Innovation presents their work to business units, who dutifully add it to roadmaps already packed to the ceiling with committed work. Everyone nods and agrees the innovation is interesting. But there’s no clear path to integrate it right now.
So the innovation waits. The business doesn’t reimagine how to reach its destination faster. It just adds one more thing to an already overloaded journey. Eventually, most of these innovations die because they were solving problems nobody asked them to solve.
That’s the core issue. Additive innovation adds to roadmaps rather than helping the business completely reimagine how to get where it’s going, faster. Meanwhile, the strategic challenges that could fundamentally change the trajectory of the business go unaddressed.
Why We Keep Making This Mistake
In regulated industries or companies with long histories, keeping innovation and strategy apart feels safer. Innovation can experiment “over there” while the core business focuses on execution “over here.” If it fails, at least it didn’t blow up our operations.
I get the logic. When failure has actual consequences, creating a separate space for innovation provides psychological safety. It’s reasonable.
But here’s what I’ve seen happen over and over. When you confuse autonomy with disconnection, you guarantee that innovation stays on the periphery. Innovation teams absolutely need autonomy to move quickly. They shouldn’t be encumbered by the slower pace of the core business. But autonomy doesn’t mean operating in a vacuum. That’s the critical distinction most organizations miss.
The incentive structures make this worse. Innovation teams get measured on activity metrics. How many ideas generated? How many pilots launched? Strategy teams get measured on plan execution and business outcomes. In my experience, these metrics don’t just live in different worlds. Sometimes they actively work against each other.
Innovation also tends to skew way too flashy. There’s pressure to showcase cutting edge technology. But flashy doesn’t always equal valuable. When innovation becomes about optics instead of outcomes, you end up with impressive technology that never becomes essential to how the business actually operates.
What Innovation Should Actually Be
Innovation’s job is to understand where the business is going and help it get there faster by exploring what’s now possible within the confines of that strategy.
That’s it. Not creating a portfolio of cool projects. Not building a lab full of impressive demos. Innovation exists to accelerate strategic outcomes. Everything else? Theater.
When innovation works this way, it becomes less flashy and way more practical. It stops being a separate function showcasing what’s possible and starts becoming an essential element of how the business operates.
This approach has three characteristics that additive innovation completely lacks:
Directionally aligned. Innovation efforts begin with strategic objectives. The OKRs. The key results the business needs to achieve. Not with emerging technologies. The innovation team that asks “what strategic outcomes are we trying to drive?” before “what technologies should we explore?” They understand the business’s intent and direction, then reimagine the roadmap to deliver outsized results rather than incremental improvements.
Capacity conscious. Strategic innovation focuses on accelerating roadmap progress and leapfrogging where possible. If innovation can help the business reach a strategic milestone in six months instead of eighteen, that creates capacity across the entire organization. Resources committed to the original timeline can be redeployed. The business moves faster because innovation cleared a faster path.
Execution focused. The output isn’t production ready code. That’s not realistic for a lean innovation team. But it is rapid proof of concepts that demystify key elements and accelerate the enterprise’s ability to build solutions. Innovation demonstrates what’s possible, validates technical approaches, and de-risks implementation. Their job is to compress the learning curve, not to replace engineering.
People push back. “But doesn’t this limit innovation? What about breakthrough ideas that don’t fit current strategy?”
Here’s my answer: Breakthrough innovations that don’t serve your strategy are distractions, not breakthroughs. If an idea is truly transformational, it should map to your strategic ambitions.
The companies that worry they’ll miss something big by focusing innovation on strategy are usually drowning in ideas that go nowhere. What they’re actually missing is the discipline to focus innovation where it matters most. There are big transformations there too with the potential that the idea becomes reality.
Building the Strategy Innovation Partnership
Making this shift requires tight connection between strategy and innovation functions. Not superficial coordination where you have a monthly sync meeting and call it collaboration.
Strategy teams know where the business is heading, what outcomes need achieving, which capabilities need building. Innovation teams know what technologies are maturing, what’s becoming possible, how to prototype quickly. The value sits in the overlap between these two types of knowledge.
Innovation leaders need to participate in strategic planning from the beginning. This early involvement lets innovation identify strategic problems they’re uniquely positioned to accelerate.
Here’s what makes this powerful. Innovation can become the immediate activation of strategy. Because innovation teams can move quickly and build proof of concepts rapidly, they can start working on strategic priorities before traditional planning cycles would allow. Instead of waiting months for implementation to begin, innovation can have a working prototype in weeks that helps the business understand what’s possible.
In my experience, this changes the nature of strategic planning itself. When innovation is embedded in the process, strategy becomes more ambitious because the team can see what’s achievable with new approaches.
Strategy leaders need to provide clear direction on strategic intent. The outcomes the business needs to achieve and why they matter. Not detailed requirements. In my experience, the best innovation work happens when strategy says “we need to fundamentally change how we serve clients in this area” rather than “we need to reduce processing time by 20%.” The first gives innovation room to explore within strategic constraints.
Making the Shift: What It Takes
For strategy leaders: Bring innovation into strategic planning early. Articulate strategic intent, not detailed requirements. Say no to innovations that don’t accelerate strategy. I know that feels risky. But you don’t have unlimited capacity. Every non strategic innovation project takes resources away from strategic ones. Create air cover for killing projects that aren’t working. In risk averse cultures, stopping something feels like admitting failure. Reframe it. Killing a non strategic project is good portfolio management.
For innovation leaders: Start every conversation with strategic outcomes before exploring any technology. Maintain your autonomy but eliminate disconnect. Build deep partnerships with strategy teams where you understand their challenges and they understand your capabilities. Change how you measure success. Stop counting pilots launched. Start measuring value delivered to strategic priorities. How much did you accelerate time to market? What strategic capabilities did you validate?
For CEOs and executive leadership: You might need to reorganize. If innovation and strategy sit in completely different parts of the organization, that structure reinforces disconnection. Find shared metrics that tie both teams to strategic outcomes. Model the behavior you want. When innovation teams present ideas, ask “how does this accelerate our strategy?” Give explicit permission to stop doing additive innovation. Innovation teams need to hear from the top that it’s expected they’ll focus narrowly on strategic priorities rather than broadly on anything innovative.
Beyond the Lab
The companies that will win over the next decade won’t be those with the biggest innovation budgets. They’ll be the organizations where innovation and strategy are inseparable. Where every innovation effort accelerates strategic outcomes.
This requires letting go of comfortable beliefs like the idea that breakthrough ideas come from unbounded exploration.
In my experience, those beliefs lead to innovation programs that generate activity without impact, ideas without execution, and pilots that never reach production.
I’ve seen it work. Projects that used to stall in pilot purgatory now accelerate the business’s ability to execute. Innovation capacity that used to be scattered gets focused on the few things that matter most. Strategy execution gets faster because innovation is compressing learning cycles and clearing the path forward.
The question isn’t “are we innovative enough?” The question is “is our innovation accelerating our strategy?”
If the answer is no, if you’re practicing additive innovation, it’s time to make a change.
Stop adding to the pile. Start accelerating what matters.