Most people who work on innovation have a general sense of what they’re good at.

What they rarely have is a precise understanding of where in the innovation process they contribute most — and where they quietly depend on others to carry the work forward.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

For individuals

Innovation isn’t a single skill. It’s a sequence of activities — spotting signals, framing opportunities, designing experiments, building solutions, scaling them through organizations — and most people are genuinely energized by some of those activities and genuinely drained by others.

Over years of research, teaching, and hands-on innovation work, Growth Innovation Strategy and Clarity Group observed a repeatable pattern: People tend to contribute to innovation in five primary ways.

Some spot what others miss. Some define opportunity from ambiguity. Some reduce risk through testing. Some move ideas through organizations. And some align people, resources, and direction to make innovation real. We’ve come to see those patterns as our five innovation archetypes: Explorer, Opportunity Mapper, Experimenter, Mobilizer, and Innovation Leader.

Each reflects a person’s strongest innovation habits, while additional strengths shape how that archetype shows up in practice, producing dozens of distinct “innovation personalities.”

Our goal wasn’t to label people. It was to help them understand more quickly how and where they create value in innovation work, where they may need partners — and how stronger teams can be built on purpose.

What we walked away with is language. Precise language for what you do well, what costs you energy, where your strengths can become liabilities if you’re not paying attention, and what kinds of partnerships make you more effective.

That self-knowledge turned out to be useful in any innovation context — whether you’re leading a team, joining one, or trying to understand why certain kinds of work consistently energize or exhaust you.

For teams

Every team has an innovation fingerprint — a collective pattern of where energy concentrates and where it thins out.

A team heavy in Explorers generates rich insights that never get tested. A team of Mobilizers executes efficiently toward the wrong opportunity. A team without a strong Experimenter runs pilots that produce activity but not learning. These are predictable failure modes. They show up repeatedly, across industries and organization types, because at the process level, personalities become structural.

When a team maps its collective Innovation Personalities, those patterns become visible. You can see which stages of the innovation life cycle your team covers well, where you have genuine gaps, and what that predicts about where your initiatives are most likely to stall.

That conversation — who are we, collectively, as innovators, and what does that mean for how we work? — is one of the most useful conversations a team can have. The assessment gives it structure.

Take it here. It takes about ten minutes:

Take the Innovation Personality Assessment

— James Janega, Clarity Group

If you’re a Director of Innovation or Product right now, there’s a decent chance you feel stuck.

Too senior to be treated like an individual contributor. Too junior to be trusted with a VP title. Surrounded by layoffs, reorganizations, and job descriptions that seem written for someone else.

That tension isn’t imagined. And it isn’t about performance.

It’s structural.

The Underlying Problem

The job you were preparing for has quietly changed.

For years, the path upward rewarded people who could manage complexity: roadmaps, backlogs, cross-functional coordination, delivery under pressure. That skill set still matters—but it’s no longer what separates Directors from VPs.

At the executive level, companies aren’t optimizing for throughput. They’re optimizing for judgment.

That’s the shift most mid-career innovators feel—but can’t quite name.

Evidence of Scope (What the Market Is Signaling)

This wasn’t obvious to me at first. It surfaced gradually.

Over time, similar conversations started repeating. Current and former Booth students compared notes on roles that felt less like classic product leadership and more like internal general-management assignments. Brands and executive-education clients asked for help upskilling leaders who were realizing, sometimes uncomfortably, that innovation was no longer a “nice-to-have” capability, but something central to how leaders were expected to perform. Then: Former colleagues from consulting and industry—people I hadn’t worked with in years—reached out with questions about AI, innovation, and operating-model change.

What on earth was going on? Sure enough, there was some signal in the jobs data noise.

Five Numbers That Explain the Squeeze—and the Shift

1. +31% Leadership-level product roles grew 31% year-over-year, even as overall PM hiring cooled. → Demand didn’t disappear. It moved up the ladder.

2. 6% Only 6% of companies qualify as “AI high performers,” generating meaningful EBIT impact from AI. → Everyone’s experimenting. Almost no one is scaling. That gap needs owners.

3. 33% Just one-third of organizations have scaled AI beyond pilots—despite 88% using AI somewhere. → “Pilot purgatory” is real, and executives are done funding it.

4. 43% Almost half of product leaders report being held accountable for business outcomes and revenue, not features. → The job changed before the title did.

5. 123,000 Over 123,000 tech workers were laid off in 2025—while leadership hiring still grew. → Execution roles were cut. Outcome owners were retained.

Taken alone, each stat is interesting. Taken together, they tell one story:

• The middle is getting thinner

• Leadership demand is concentrating

• AI is everywhere—but value is rare

• Accountability is rising faster than authority

• The market is selecting for judgment, not delivery

Leadership roles in product and innovation have grown even as individual contributor roles softened. Compensation at the top remains strong, but the ladder in the middle has narrowed. Directors are increasingly squeezed—too experienced to step back, not yet prepared to step up. That pattern wasn’t anecdotal noise. It pointed to something larger.

This isn’t a motivation gap. It’s a scope gap.

The Path Forward (According to the Evidence)

In 2026, VPs of Innovation and Product are no longer hired to own roadmaps.

They’re hired to own outcomes.

That distinction sounds subtle until you’re in the room where decisions get made. Roadmaps are negotiable. Outcomes are not.

Boards and CEOs are asking different questions now:

• What revenue or cost impact did this produce?

• Which bets did you stop—and why?

• How did AI move from pilot to profit?

• What tradeoffs did this require elsewhere in the business?

The Directors who stall are often excellent at execution. But execution is no longer the differentiator.

The people moving up are already doing three things differently:

1. They speak in business terms first.
   Not features. Not velocity. Outcomes—revenue, margin, risk, optionality.

2. They treat AI as an operating decision, not a novelty.
   They decide where AI belongs, where it doesn’t, and how value scales—then enforce focus.

3. They act like general managers before they’re named one.
   They make tradeoffs, kill work, reallocate resources, and align functions around a single narrative.

They don’t wait for permission to think this way. They demonstrate it.

What This Means for You

If you’re a mid-career innovator feeling squeezed, don’t read that as a verdict.

Read it as a signal.

The door didn’t close.
It moved.

The path forward isn’t about being louder, busier, or more technically fluent. It’s about being clearer—about what matters, what doesn’t, and what outcomes you’re willing to own.

The people who step into VP roles next will be the ones who stopped managing work—and started owning results.

And many of them are already in the middle, whether the title has caught up yet or not.

Good luck.

Every October, the specialized committees and institutions designated in the will of Alfred Nobel decide who will receive the world’s most prized family of awards—among them, economics. Most years, economists peer at it and look back at decades of meticulously built academic work. A lens into purposeful thinking. This year, the prize exposed a pattern useful outside of economic scholarship: How progress actually spreads. And that’s as forward-looking as it gets.

Beneath the formal phrasing was a sly little truth. Progress isn’t about knowing more. It’s about learning faster.

It sounds tidy, trite -- cute -- but it’s radical. And it’s especially relevant in an age with so much turbulence and uncertainty. Because if the ideas behind this year’s Economics Nobel are true, leadership isn’t about prediction or genius or data dashboards. It’s about building systems that can absorb reality faster than reality changes.

1. You need to learn faster.

Some companies inhale new ideas and grow stronger. Others choke on them. The difference isn’t curiosity -- it’s comprehension.

Teams that grasp why things work can improvise; teams that only copy how things work eventually hit the ceiling of someone else’s success. That’s the discovery the Nobel committee honored this year: The strongest firms don’t just invent—they learn.

Ask yourself: Are you training people to follow recipes or to taste as they cook? Behind every process hides a principle. Understand it, and you can rebuild when the rules change. Copying seems easy, but it’s a treadmill. Comprehension travels.

2. Know thyself: Laggard or leader?

Every company lives somewhere on the technology curve. Some chase the frontier, where new innovations lay the tracks. Others follow behind, watching where the rails lead.

The trick is knowing which one you are -- because the right strategy depends on it.

If you’re a laggard, your job isn’t to invent. It’s to learn fast. Build your absorptive capacity: Your ability to find, understand, and apply what others have already proven. If you’re a leader on the frontier, imitation won’t save you. You’re in the world of “what have you done for me lately?” You need a strategy for selecting the next smart move -- experiments that stretch your thinking, so you don’t press your luck.

Most organizations sit somewhere in between. For them, benchmarking is both comfort and danger. What once saved time can start wasting it. So ask yourself: Have we crossed the line where copying costs as much as creating?

If so, it’s time to build again. Start small. Try something that scares you a little. That flutter you feel? That’s learning, waking up.

3. Knowledge is only power if it moves.

Inside most companies, good ideas slow to a crawl. A single insight can spend its short life bouncing between silos, stuck in inboxes marked “circling back.” That’s not just bureaucracy -- it’s friction. And friction burns.

Think of your company as a nervous system. How fast does a fingertip tell the brain the stove is hot? If the answer is “two quarterly reviews,” you’ve already lost some skin. The fix isn’t another tool; it’s circulation -- ideas flowing freely from the edge of the business to its core.

Here’s a quick test. Pick one idea -- a customer complaint, a bright experiment, a market signal -- and trace its path from discovery to decision. If it crosses more than two meetings or one VP who “just wants to align,” you’re paying too much for what you already know.

Knowledge that can’t travel isn’t knowledge. It’s inventory.

4. Build routines around learning.

Routines are how organizations remember. Some preserve wisdom. Others preserve bureaucracy. Learning lives in repetition -- in the habits we rehearse without thinking. Routines are the muscle memory of an organization. Some keep you limber. Others lock your joints.

Open your calendar. Count the meetings about discovery versus the ones about reporting. If updates outnumber insights, you’re not leading a learning culture; you’re running a book club where no one reads.

Trade one “status” meeting for a conversation that starts with, “What surprised us?” Keep asking until it feels normal. Learning isn’t a metric. It’s the simple habit of saying, “That didn’t go as planned -- and here’s what we found.”

5. Inhale, exhale.

Economists call it absorptive capacity—how well an organization turns new knowledge into action. In practice, it’s how you breathe: take in ideas, circulate them, and release results before they go stale.

Some companies hold their breath. They gather insights, lock them in decks, and wait for permission to exhale. Others keep a steady rhythm—inhale what’s new, process what matters, exhale improvement. It’s not mindfulness; it’s metabolism.

Lose that rhythm, and even brilliant organizations start to faint. Keep it, and you don’t just stay alive—you build stamina. The companies that breathe well learn faster than the world changes. They’re the ones setting the pace while everyone else gasps for air.

Here’s the whisper behind this year’s Nobel: Even when you’re good at predicting disruption, you still need to practice for it. And this year’s Nobel is clear: Disruption is constantly out there.

Teach your teams to learn faster. Share discoveries before they fossilize or get forgotten. Unlearn what no longer serves you. Then do it again.

There is no finish line. Only the unending waltz of progress. It’s a rhythm -- a dance between curiosity and humility. The winners are the ones still dancing when the music changes.

I’ve been thinking about this week’s Nobel Prize in Economics — an award that’s really about how we manage disruption, and what it says about us now.

The 2025 Nobel in Economic Sciences went to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth.” The committee split the prize: half to Mokyr (Northwestern and Tel Aviv University) for identifying the conditions that let technological progress become sustained growth, and half to Aghion (INSEAD) and Howitt (Brown) for mapping the mechanics of that process -- what Joseph Schumpeter famously called “creative destruction.”

Mokyr’s work offers three simple, brutal rules for when technology actually changes the world instead of just cluttering it. First, a society has to want change -- not just tolerate it, but believe progress is worth the discomfort it brings. Second, its institutions must reward experimentation rather than defend the status quo. And third, there must be a bridge of practitioners -- people fluent in both the language of ideas and the grit of implementation -- who can turn theory into gears, kilns, and code.

Images ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Without all three working in concert, invention stays a spark that never catches. Mokyr says this alignment turns discovery into development and technology into sustained prosperity. Miss one piece, and progress slips quietly back into the archives.

History gives him all the evidence he needed to convince the Nobel committee. In 18th-century Britain, open curiosity met supportive laws and a nation of skilled tinkerers. Patents, prizes, and permissive courts kept innovation flowing, while artisans turned designs into the steam engines, looms, and ironworks that remade the economy. Late-imperial China had the opposite problem: Printing, gunpowder, and the compass -- world-changing inventions -- but a bureaucracy that prized conformity over curiosity. Its inventors had no institutional runway, so the engines of progress idled. And the Ottoman Empire? It banned the printing press for centuries to protect religious authority; by the time permission came, the papermakers and printers had vanished.

Images ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Mokyr’s point rings like a bell in the age of AI, climate tech, and social equity: Technology alone doesn’t guarantee progress, no matter what technology utopians or Silicon Valley spin suggests. It’s how it’s managed -- how open we are to change, and how ready our institutions and skills are to absorb it -- that decides whether a good idea takes root or dies waiting for permission. That’s the magic Mokyr makes: How conjure progress from possibility.

Mokyr figured out how to open the door, but how does an opportune moment turn into sustained growth?

That’s where Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt pick up the thread. They gave us a map of how economies actually grow: Not smoothly, not kindly, but through constant replacement. In a 1992 paper, they showed new ideas don’t just compound -- they upend. Each breakthrough “steals business” from its predecessors, replacing older products and firms with better ones. Growth, in their telling, isn’t a rising tide that lifts all boats; it’s a relay race where each runner overtakes the last, driven by curiosity, ambition, and -- let’s be honest -- fear of falling behind.

Their model endures because it feels real. Innovation comes in steps, each one improving quality by a fixed factor, as economies climb quality ladders one rung at a time. Despite the chaos, the system finds rhythm: An equilibrium built on just enough imbalance.

Images ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

But that same engine can overheat, Aghion, Howitt and their many collaborators discovered. Too much innovation wastes energy when firms chase trivial gains; too little, and monopoly power or risk-aversion strangles creativity.

Work with co-authors like Rachel Griffith, Richard Blundell, and Nicholas Bloom revealed the “inverted-U” of competition: Too little, and firms snooze; too much, and the smaller ones give up. The sweet spot is where rivals are close enough to see each other’s taillights.

With Daron Acemoglu and Fabrizio Zilibotti, they widened the view to nations: Those behind the frontier should imitate and invest (think Japan’s Meiji Restoration, or Saudi Arabia today); those on the frontier must compete and dare (the U.S., Israel, Singapore, China). It’s elegant, bracing, and deeply human -- a theory that reminds us progress leaves bruises as often as fingerprints.

Big picture: Mokyr showed us why some societies catch fire with innovation and others don’t, Aghion and Howitt explain how that fire keeps burning. The same forces that powered Britain’s steam age or Japan’s Meiji leap are at play now in every modern transformation -- from AI to clean power. Together, they teach one thing: Progress depends on balance. Push too little, and societies (or companies) sink into comfort. Push too hard without guardrails, and they burn out -- smaller participants give up, and the system loses trust.

In my classrooms and with my clients, we talk about the three families of innovation risk -- Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability. Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt show they operate at every level: From product design to national policy. Mokyr begins with Feasibility -- can we make it work? -- and shows that technical brilliance alone doesn’t sustain itself. He reminds us that Desirability and Viability (the willingness of society and the permissiveness of its institutions) determine whether that brilliance compounds or collapses. Aghion and Howitt then give that structure momentum: The elegant mathematics of creative destruction, where each leap forward demands that something old give way. Feasibility, like talk, is cheap. Without Desirability, societies resist the new; without Viability, institutions choke it. The engine only works when the gears mesh.

The same logic applies inside every organization facing disruption: Build what people truly want, ensure it can be done, and engage your strategic thinkers to design and navigate the system of systems -- markets, teams, incentives -- so that the better idea can win, and that idea is yours.

So what do we do with that?

Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt didn’t write instruction manuals for CEOs or policymakers -- but they did issue a challenge.

Their work doubles as a leadership checklist for the age of AI, robotics, and clean power: A reminder that the same gears turning inside economies turn inside your organization, too.

If you lead a company, keep the engine on. Fund more experiments than feel comfortable, and let a few threaten your core business. (Economists don’t care how hard that is, but this Substack does.) That’s creative destruction by design, the only way to stay alive. Tune into competition: Don’t let learning stop; create contests that push your teams to outrun one another without burning out. And tighten the knowledge braid: Mokyr’s insight -- that progress depends on connecting theory to practice -- translates today into pairing data scientists with operators, engineers with customers, strategists with the people who actually touch the product.

If you’re in policy or civic life, your job is to keep the system fair and flexible. Keep markets open enough for challengers to emerge, but invest in skills, mobility, and safety nets so people can move with the frontier instead of fearing it. And measure what matters -- innovation often shows up first as uncounted quality, not GDP points.

And if you’re a worker, founder, or student: skate toward skills with spillovers -- data fluency, systems thinking, human–machine collaboration -- and learn to surf the churn rather than dread it. (I sympathize) Every wave of change leaves room for those who can see it coming and paddle in front of it.

The bottom line is simple, even if it’s not easy: Prosperity isn’t automatic.

In fact, as the Nobel committee read out of Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt’s work, the norm is stagnation. Nature abhors change, even as it succombs to it -- always.

Prosperity is a series of system choices. Keep the knowledge flywheel turning (Mokyr), keep the competitive engine humming (Aghion–Howitt), and cushion the humans in the gears so progress compounds rather than corrodes.

That’s the real takeaway of this year’s Nobel in Economics: A field guide for how to grow, adapt, and keep the future human.

— James

Innovation isn’t magic. It isn’t luck. It’s a mindset—a way of moving through the world so that every moment, every encounter, becomes raw material for something new.

The truth is: we already walk past possibilities every day. Most of us miss them. But those who train themselves to notice, to ask, to try, to connect, and to synthesize—those are the leaders who unlock breakthroughs.

That’s what the WATCH framework is about:

• W – Watch: See what others overlook. Notice workarounds, hacks, and unspoken needs. Learn to look with fresh eyes.

• A – Ask: Push past the obvious. Use Whys and What-ifs. Question assumptions. Challenge the rules that keep you stuck.

• T – Test: Don’t just think. Try. Run small bets, prototypes, and experiments that turn hunches into evidence.

• C – Connect: Get out of your corner. Learn from people outside your bubble. Cross disciplines. Borrow insights from unexpected places.

• H – Harvest: Don’t stop at fragments. Connect the dots. Link patterns, gather threads, and weave them into something new.

The Gift of an Innovator’s Mindset

WATCH isn’t another to-do list. It’s an invitation. To live more awake. To treat every detail, every question, every trial, every connection, as fuel for possibility.

When you Watch, you realize the world is full of signals. When you Ask, you stop settling for shallow answers. When you Test, you shrink the gap between theory and reality. When you Connect, you expand the pool of ideas. When you Harvest, you turn fragments into frameworks.

Innovation stops being something reserved for a few. It becomes something available to all of us—if we choose to see differently.

Try This

Tomorrow, write down one thing you noticed, one question you asked, one experiment you tried, one connection you made, and one dot you connected. That’s WATCH in action. Simple, small, repeatable.

Do that, and you’ll discover innovation isn’t a lightning strike. It’s a habit.

And it’s one you can build right now. If you've been following along -- it's a mindset you've already started.

— James.

When people are scared to innovate, there's three things I wish they knew.

The first is that most breakthroughs aren’t born—they’re borrowed. Pieces that already exist get rearranged until they finally click. Innovation is connecting the dots. That’s harvesting.

The second is that innovation work is just work. We mythologize the lone genius—but real innovators are gardeners. They don’t create the seed. They notice, tend, and graft together what’s already sprouting.

And in the final estimation, innovation isn’t lightning. It’s compost. Bits and scraps of past ideas break down, mix together, and fertilize something new.

Yesterday, we talked about how your personal and professional connections are a source of new viewpoints and insights. Today, I want to talk about connecting the dots once you have them. I think this is the master skill for innovators — and it’s certainly one I’ve benefitted from.

Why Harvesting Matters

We’ve Watched. We’ve Asked. We’ve Tested. We’ve Connected. But unless we can synthesize, all we have is fragments. Harvesting is the skill of pulling threads together—spotting patterns, building analogies, and weaving new solutions from the raw material of observation and connection.

Three Levels of Harvesting

• If you’re just starting: Practice analogies. Whenever you learn something new, ask: “What is this like in another field I know?” Or ask yourself “What would [BLANK] do to solve this problem?” [BLANK] can be anybody. How would Apple solve a problem? Amazon? A lawyer? A physicist? Your sister?

• If you’re developing the skill: Use frameworks like SCAMPER—Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Reverse—and borrow ideas from other brands and other industries. Think in other boxes.

• If you’re seeking mastery: Look for the macrotrends. Weave insights from diverse domains, and flip them into breakthrough concepts and business models.

Everyday Examples

Think about how Southwest Airlines borrowed from bus travel to reimagine air travel. Or how IDEO famously cross-pollinates across industries—using lessons from hospitals to redesign shopping carts, or from nature to improve product design. These aren’t strokes of luck. They’re acts of harvesting.

The Bigger Picture

Harvesting is the capstone of the WATCH framework. Watching without harvesting leaves you with observations. Asking without harvesting leaves you with questions. Testing without harvesting leaves you with data. Connecting without harvesting leaves you with conversations. It’s only in harvesting that those pieces come together into something new.

Try This Today

Before the week is over, take two unrelated notes from your journal—something you watched and something you heard—and force a connection. Ask, “What happens if these two ideas collide?” Write down three possible outcomes. See if one of them is worth testing.

Innovation doesn’t come from more dots. After a point, that’s just paralyzing. It comes from harvesting the ones you already have—and daring to connect them.

— James.

Innovation is contagious—but only if you leave your corner and catch it from someone else. Yesterday we talked about Test—how ideas gain strength only when they’re tried in the world. Today, we move to the fourth step in the WATCH framework: Connect.

Why Connection Matters

Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when ideas, people, and experiences intersect. The best breakthroughs rarely emerge from a single genius locked in a room—they come from the messy collisions of perspectives, the sparks that fly when you leave your own bubble.

You already know this intuitively: the most interesting ideas often come from outside your field. A musician inspires a product designer. A doctor borrows a process from aviation. A teacher learns from a theater director. Innovation happens in the seams.

Three Levels of Connection

• If you’re just starting: Have one conversation each week with someone outside your usual circle. Listen more than you speak.

• If you’re developing the skill: Join or build communities of practice where ideas flow across disciplines, and share your own experiments and questions.

• If you’re seeking mastery: Become a connector. Curate diverse networks across industries, geographies, and cultures—and actively bring people together who wouldn’t otherwise meet.

Everyday Examples

Think of Steve Jobs visiting calligraphy class, and later using those lessons to shape the typography that made Apple iconic. Or Toyota learning from grocery store restocking systems to perfect just-in-time manufacturing. In both cases, the innovation didn’t come from looking harder at their own industry—it came from connecting dots across boundaries.

The Bigger Picture

Connect is the antidote to tunnel vision. Watching, Asking, and Testing are powerful, but without diverse inputs, you’ll keep circling the same old ground. When you connect, you import fresh raw material into your innovation system. That’s when the new possibilities multiply.

WATCH So Far

• W – Watch: See what others overlook.

• A – Ask: Push past the obvious with Whys and What-ifs.

• T – Test: Turn hunches into evidence with small bets.

• C – Connect: Learn from people outside your bubble.

• H – Harvest: Link patterns, gather threads, and connect the dots.

Try This Today

Before the week is over, reach out to someone in a completely different domain—an artist, an engineer, a nurse, a chef—and ask them how they solve problems. Don’t pitch. Don’t sell. Just listen. Capture one insight that makes you think differently about your own work.

That’s what it means to connect the dots you don’t yet see.

Next up in the WATCH series: Harvest. Because noticing, asking, testing, and connecting only matter if you can synthesize the pieces into something new.

Treat an idea like fine china, and it never leaves the cupboard. Treat it like clay, and it takes shape in your hands. Untested ideas don’t get better. They just get older and more expensive.

Yesterday we talked about Ask—how innovation often begins not with better answers, but with better questions. (If you missed it, you can catch up here). Today, let’s move to the third step in the WATCH framework: Test.

Why Testing Matters

Ideas don’t improve in isolation. They improve when exposed to the real world. Too many organizations get stuck in endless meetings, polishing PowerPoint decks instead of trying something small, fast, and real. The longer you wait, the more you gamble. Testing lowers the stakes while raising the learning.

Testing isn’t about proving you’re right—it’s about discovering what’s true.

Three Levels of Testing

• If you’re beginning: Try rapid, low-cost experiments in daily decisions. Change your routine, swap a process, or tweak an email subject line. See what happens and learn from it.

• If you’re developing your capabilities: Run small A/B tests alongside prototypes or pilots. A new product idea? Test two different versions of the sign-up page. Trying a new service process? Prototype it with one team before rolling it out.

• If you’re seeking mastery: Institutionalize experimentation. Build systems, metrics, and governance so that testing isn’t an afterthought but part of a core operating principle. At this level, leaders reward learning as much as results.

Everyday Examples

Think about Amazon’s constant A/B testing on its site, or how Spotify quietly trials new playlist features with a fraction of its users. These aren’t lucky guesses—they’re disciplined experiments. Even at the smallest scale, you can do the same. Want to improve a presentation? Test two different openings. Want to improve team engagement? Pilot a new meeting format for a week.

The Bigger Picture

Testing is the hinge between theory and evidence. Watching and Asking generate possibilities, but without Testing, those possibilities stay unproven. This is where innovation gains traction—where the abstract collides with reality, and you learn what really works.

WATCH So Far

• W – Watch: See what others overlook.

• A – Ask: Push past the obvious with Whys and What-ifs.

• T – Test: Turn hunches into evidence with small bets.

• C – Connect: Learn from people outside your bubble.

• H – Harvest: Link patterns, gather threads, connect the dots.

Try This Today

Before lunch, run one small experiment. Send two versions of an email. Rearrange your workspace. Try a different way of opening a meeting. At the end of the day, write down what you learned. It doesn’t need to be groundbreaking—it needs to be tested.

Innovation isn’t built on lightning strikes. It’s built on experiments that compound. The more you test, the faster you learn, and the closer you get to something that works.

Next up in the WATCH series: Connect. Because innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it happens in networks.

— James.

What if the problem isn’t that you don’t have answers—what if it’s that you’re asking the wrong questions?

Most leaders are wired to solve. Quicker, cheaper, faster. We jump to efficiency before we’ve clarified the real challenge. But innovation isn’t about speed to the wrong finish line—it’s about aiming at the right target.

That’s where Ask comes in, the second step of the WATCH framework.

Yesterday, I introduced the framework and the first principle: Actually Watch what happens around you. But then go deeper.

Innovators don’t settle for the first question. They push further. They interrogate assumptions. They stretch the frame.

Here’s how to start, and how to get better:

• You’re a beginner: Start with the Five Whys. Take any problem—say, “sales are flat”—and keep asking why until you hit something fundamental. Alongside it, apply the three lenses: Why is this desirable? How is it feasible? What makes it viable?

• You want to develop: Practice “thinking outside the box.” Flip the question. Instead of “How do we sell more?” ask “Why don’t customers buy more?” or “What would eliminate the need for our product entirely?” Suddenly, the horizon shifts.

• You’re striving for mastery: Use questioning to challenge orthodoxy itself. Convene your team not to find an answer, but to dismantle the hidden rules. Ask what’s sacred, and whether it should be. Ask what’s off-limits, and what happens if you cross the line. Finally, ask: “How might we develop a more satisfying answer?”

When you get good at asking, you don’t just dig deeper—you widen the field of play. The obvious fades, and new possibilities come into view.

That’s the heart of innovation: If you want surprising answers, ask questions that open the field of play.

Next up in the WATCH series: Test. Because questions without experiments are just theory.

— James

Most of us miss the obvious.

We walk past it every day—at the coffee shop, in the checkout line, in our meetings—blind to the clues that innovation hides in plain sight.

A customer improvises a fix for something that should have worked the first time. A colleague hacks together a workaround in a spreadsheet. A neighbor queues up in a way that reveals the real bottleneck in a service line.

These aren’t accidents. They’re signals. And leaders who learn to watch—not just look, but really watch—see possibilities where others see routines.

That’s the first move in what I call the WATCH framework for building an innovator’s mindset. (If you want to go deeper into the research behind it, consult the classic work on the Innovator’s DNA by Clayton Christensen, Hal Gregersen, and Jeff Dyer.)

Here’s the opportunity to step up your innovation mindset:

• W – Watch: See what others overlook. Notice behaviors, workarounds, and unspoken needs.

• A – Ask: Push past the obvious with Whys and What-ifs.

• T – Test: Try small bets that turn hunches into evidence.

• C – Connect: Learn from people beyond your bubble.

• H – Harvest: Gather threads, link patterns, and weave new solutions. Connect the dots.

Want to get better at Watching? (You should!)

If you’re just starting:

• Keep a pocket notebook or phone list. Write down three things a stranger might notice that you usually ignore.

• Watch for hacks and workarounds. Every shortcut is a signal of something broken.

• Pretend you’re a tourist in your own space. What feels odd, unnecessary, or invisible until you look with fresh eyes?

If you’re developing the skill:

• Pick a place and treat it like a lab—observe systematically. Where do people hesitate, repeat, or improvise?

• Shadow someone at work. Don’t guide, don’t interrupt—just notice what slows them down or makes them smile.

• Look for contrasts: first-timers versus veterans, rush hour versus downtime. What changes? What stays the same?

If you’re seeking mastery:

• Design and lead ethnographic studies. Go where the friction lives, and uncover what customers can’t yet articulate.

• Teach others to see. Build a culture where noticing is rewarded as much as fixing.

• Connect the small with the big: that sticky note taped to a monitor might be the breadcrumb trail to a broken system—or your next big opportunity.

It starts with observation, but it doesn’t end there. Watching sharpens our attention. Asking reframes what we thought we knew. Testing gives us feedback we can trust. Connecting broadens our field of vision. Harvesting makes meaning out of the mess.

WATCH isn’t about adding more to your to-do list. It’s about tuning the way you already move through the world—so that every encounter, every question, every test, every connection becomes raw material for better ideas.

Start small. Today, write down three surprising things you notice before lunch. By this time next week, you’ll have a page of possibilities most people walked right past.

And once you’ve seen them, you can’t unsee them. That’s the beginning of innovation.

— James.

Yesterday, I talked about six common challenges that smother innovation, and six breakthroughs that actually work.

At the end, I promised to show you something more: how to take that same “Pain Points / Breakthroughs” framing and use it not just as a diagnostic, but as a door-opener. This is that post.

It’s about turning clarity into conversations with executives who feel the pain but haven’t yet seen a credible way forward.

Step One: Name the Pain
Executives live in patterns: missed targets, talent turnover, stalled initiatives, silo wars.
When you articulate what they rarely hear out loud, you earn instant credibility.

Fear of failure. Lip service without follow-through. Pressure for immediate ROI.
They’ll nod. You’ve got their attention.

Step Two: Offer Breakthroughs
Don’t rush to “solutions.” Offer breakthroughs that feel credible and doable.

Tiny experiments. Stage-gate clarity. Portfolio balance. Storytelling rituals.
Each one lowers risk. Each one sounds less like magic, more like management.

Step Three: Make the Shift
You’re not selling tools. You’re selling the shift.

From… extra work → To… embedded learning.
From… innovation theater → To… innovation discipline.
From… fear of failure → To… safe-to-fail learning loops.

Executives don’t just want another program. They want proof there’s a path forward that doesn’t waste time, money, or credibility.

Why This Works
A simple two-column chart — Pain vs. Breakthrough — can be the entire conversation starter.

Executives see themselves in the pain. They see possibility in the breakthrough.
And you’ve positioned yourself not as a vendor with a product, but as a guide with a system.

That’s how you shift from “interesting article” → “can we talk more about this?”

Everyone says they want an innovative culture.
Few admit how hard it really is.

The problem isn’t that your people lack ideas. The problem is that the system around them squeezes the life out of those ideas. Too many leaders confuse slogans with structure, pep talks with process.

Here’s where it breaks down — and how to fix it.

Six Pain Points That Smother Innovation

1. Fear of Failure
   People hear “experiment,” but they see punishment. So they play it safe.

2. Lip Service
   Big announcements, glossy posters… and no resources. Everyone knows the difference.

3. Silos
   Good ideas stall between functions. Turf beats teamwork.

4. Short-Term Pressure
   Quarterly ROI demands choke long-term learning.

5. Change Fatigue
   “Innovation” feels like more work on top of already too much.

6. No Clear Frameworks
   Employees don’t know how to innovate. It stays abstract.

Six Breakthroughs That Actually Work

1. Safe-to-Learn Tests (It’s NOT A FAILURE.)
   Tiny, cheap experiments that take days, not months. Learning > perfection.

2. Stage-Gate Simplicity
   Discovery → Incubation → Acceleration. Different risks, different rules, clear expectations.

3. Passports for Ideas
   Lightweight, playful tools to move ideas across silos. Collaboration becomes trackable.

4. Portfolio Thinking
   Treat innovation like an investment mix: quick wins, mid-range bets, long shots. Balance beats randomness.

5. Storytelling Rituals
   Ten minutes a week. Share an experiment, a failure, a lesson. Normalize progress.

6. Load-Balanced Innovation
   Tie innovation to daily work. Solve real problems. Free capacity.

The Point

Cultures don’t shift because leaders demand it.
They shift when people see small, credible systems that lower risk and reward learning.

This is what innovation without waste looks like: fewer pep talks, more proof points. Less jargon, more clarity.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to use this “Pain Points / Breakthroughs” framing as both thought leadership and a persuasive entry point — a way to open conversations with executives who know the pain but haven’t yet seen a credible way forward.

We used to think innovation was about ideas. Big ones. Bold ones.

Turns out, it’s more complex—and more human.

The latest research doesn’t just shout “new!”
It whispers: “together.”
And the message is clear: the next generation of market leaders won’t win by being the most inventive.
They’ll win by being the most integrated—across teams, timelines, and trust.

Five Research Signals You Shouldn’t Miss

1. Data + Human Ingenuity = Innovation That Sticks

A study of 500 Chinese managers (Wang et al.) reinforces what we see in the field: data doesn’t innovate. People do.
But when creative teams are paired with smart analytics and GenAI tools, innovation moves from idea to execution—and from isolated pilot to full-scale reinvention.

2. GenAI Is Great at Starting—But Struggles to Finish

AOM and MIT Sloan research shows GenAI excels at front-end creativity but falters when systems aren’t ready to capture the value.
The tool is real. But the infrastructure, culture, and leadership alignment matter more.
At GIS, we remind clients: AI is the hammer. You still need blueprints, scaffolding, and a team ready to build.

3. Culture Still Eats Strategy. And It’s Hungry.

Regent University’s findings on “adhocracy” show the power of experimental, autonomous cultures in driving innovation.
Posters won’t do it. Programs won’t save you.
What works? Autonomy, servant leadership, and systems that prevent organ rejection when transformation gets tough.

4. Co-Creation Is a Strategy, Not a Slogan

TryMorph’s research backs what we’ve seen in innovation sprints: when customers co-create, they stay longer, grow more, and become brand accelerants.
Move beyond feedback. Bring customers to the table as co-architects.

5. Adoption Only Happens When Systems Are Ready

SCIRP’s blend of Technology Adoption + Capability Maturity Models reminds us: early enthusiasm fades if systems aren’t built to support change.
It’s not enough to say yes to a new tool.
You need teams, timing, and truth about readiness.

Here’s the Opportunity

At GIS, we’re building a Net Innovation Score—a signal of customer-perceived innovation, and a practical way to reposition your brand as forward-moving.
A 5-point boost in customer perception of innovation correlates with $2.8B in market value. Let us know if you’d like to pilot.

Bottom Line

Innovation isn’t a department.
It’s a belief system. A structure. A rhythm.

The best breakthroughs this year weren’t about tools.
They were about teams that trust each other, timing that makes sense, and clarity that cuts through the noise.

You don’t need a new idea.
You need a better system.

Progress is built, not declared.

Let’s build it.

— James Janega
Founder, Growth Innovation Strategy
Lecturer, Innovation Leadership | Chicago Booth

Let’s cut to it.

Innovation isn’t your next idea.
It’s not your whiteboard.
It’s definitely not your deck.

Innovation is about people.
And if you’re not designing for someone specific, you’re designing for no one at all.

The most effective innovation work we’ve done—inside civic orgs, family-run firms, PE-backed companies—has this in common:
It starts not with a plan, but with empathy.

Not a vague, feel-good version of empathy.
We’re talking structured, observable, strategic empathy—grounded in the lives of the people you’re trying to serve.

Tools That Make Empathy Work

Here are five field-tested tools we use at GIS to take innovation from vague to valuable—starting with real humans.

1. User Profiles That Go Beyond Demographics

This isn’t about “millennial tech adopters” or “operations managers aged 45–60.”

It’s about understanding:

• What this person is trying to accomplish

• What’s getting in their way

• What they’re afraid of failing at

When you know what really matters to your user, you stop pitching features—and start delivering outcomes.

2. Empathy Maps: Because Feeling > Clicking

We use empathy maps to visualize what your user sees, hears, says, thinks, and feels. Not as a creative exercise—but to uncover the disconnect between what’s happening around them and what’s happening inside them.

Real innovation connects emotionally, not just functionally.

3. Customer Journeys That Feel Like… Journeys

Your product is never the whole story.
It’s one part of someone’s day. One moment in their job. One task on their plate.

Mapping the full journey—before, during, and after your product shows up—helps you identify friction, delight, and timing. Innovators who do this right don’t just reduce pain. They create flow.

4. AEIOU Observation: Watch What People Can’t Explain

We’ve learned more by quietly watching someone complete a task than from a dozen interviews.

The AEIOU method—tracking Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, and Users—helps surface the real world that your spreadsheet can’t.

Surveys lie. Habits don’t.

5. Trend Analysis That Points to What’s Next

Innovation without foresight is just catching up.

Our TRENDWISE foresight engine helps clients connect behavioral patterns, macro shifts, and industry signals to what users are about to need next—before they ask for it.

That’s not luck. That’s a system.

The Point

Great innovation isn’t flashy.
It’s useful.
It fits into someone’s life. It solves a problem they didn’t know they could ask to fix.

And when you do it right?

It doesn’t just work.
It feels right. It earns loyalty. It grows margins.
It lasts.

Bottom Line

If your innovation feels like it’s floating—go back to the person.
If your team is building something that no one’s asking for—go observe.
If your product roadmap is all guesses—go get grounded.

Because the best innovations aren’t invented.
They’re understood.

– James Janega
Founder, Growth Innovation Strategy
Lecturer, Innovation Leadership | Chicago Booth

We love to romanticize innovation.

The story usually goes like this: someone has a brilliant idea, sees what no one else sees, and turns it into the next rocket, platform, or billion-dollar exit.

But for every startup that nails the timing, and every tech company that lands on the perfect feature, there are hundreds that burned through money and time chasing "bold" ideas that never found traction.

Here’s the truth we’ve learned working inside companies that have to make it work:

Innovation isn’t a moment. It’s a system.
And it works best when it starts from the middle—where problems are messy, customers are real, and money is on the line.

Six Moves That Make Innovation Real

You don’t need to be a genius.
You need a process that’s repeatable under pressure.
Here’s what we see when innovation works—and sticks:

1. Find: Reframe the Question

The biggest leap in innovation usually isn’t the idea. It’s the question that unlocked it.

Stop asking, “How do we make this better?”
Start asking, “Why does this matter at all?”

In one GIS project, reframing the growth problem as a pricing issue—not a product one—unlocked millions in EBITDA. The product didn’t change. The narrative did.

2. Focus: Talk to the People Who Never Get Asked

Real innovation doesn’t come from a brainstorm.
It comes from fieldwork. From walking the factory floor. From asking the sales lead what they skip in the demo—and why.

Start with empathy. Stay curious.
Then cut what doesn’t matter.

3. Define: Solve the Right Problem

One of our favorite Booth case exercises involves doing nothing but refining the question. No solutions. Just digging for the root cause until it’s too obvious to ignore.

If your innovation efforts keep fizzling, ask:
Are we solving a real problem, or just a visible one?

4. Create: Build to Learn, Not to Impress

The best early prototypes are ugly. Unpolished. Uncomfortable.
That’s good.

Don’t design to convince.
Design to discover.
Discovery beats perfection every time.

5. Test: Prove It Before You Scale It

Too many companies try to win the race before they finish the warm-up.

We help clients run short, controlled sprints—real-world tests with clear success metrics. No sandbox. No theory. Just:
Did it work?
Can we scale it?
Would the team do it again tomorrow?

6. De-Risk: Borrow Brains, Share the Load

The best innovators don’t go it alone.
They collaborate. They license. They crowdsource.
They ask, “Who already solved part of this?” and build from there.

Innovation doesn’t have to be solo or sexy.
It has to work.

The Point

You don’t need a muse.
You need a method.

The good news?
Innovation is buildable.

It’s a process you can teach, a muscle you can grow, and a system you can fund with early wins instead of long shots.

That’s what we do at Growth Innovation Strategy—and what we’ll keep exploring here on Return on Clarity.

If your innovation efforts are stuck—or worse, stalled behind a wall of PowerPoint—reach out. We’ll help you find the real problem, and walk you toward what works.

– James Janega
Founder, Growth Innovation Strategy
Lecturer, Innovation Leadership | Chicago Booth

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