Name: What High-Innovation Teams Do Differently - And How to Copy It
Uploaded: 2026-05-20
Duration: 18 min 22 s

Many organizations don’t have an innovation problem—they have a repetition problem. What does it take to design teams that consistently turn ideas into impact, avoiding the same meetings and outdated structures? Two leading thinkers on creativity and innovation will explore how to form teams, leadership, and incentives to spark bold thinking, break down silos, and embed experimentation into everyday work. How do you balance speed and creativity? How do you reward risk-taking while delivering results? We’ll also examine how AI can subtly accelerate collaboration and decision-making without replacing human ingenuity.

Sheena Iyengar, S.T. Lee Professor of Business, Columbia Business School
Jeff DeGraff, Dean of Innovation, University of Michigan
Moderator: Ruth Umoh, C-Suite and Leadership Editor, Fortune

What High-Innovation Teams Do Differently - And How to Copy It

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Alright, I want to set the stage around the what I call the illusion of innovation. In a recent survey, some 84% of executives said that innovation is critical. In that same survey, it found that some 95% of new products fail. So my question for the both of you is, why are we seeing that disconnect? Is it that organizations are feeling that generating creative ideas, or are they feeling that the selection and execution phase, where's this bottleneck happening, uh, in your opinions? Well, I, I would start by simply saying a couple different things when we talk about innovation. Most leaders are talking about what I would call project management. They're talking about extensions of what they currently have. They're talking about, uh, value propositions that are basically going to move the share price, and I don't think that's real innovation. I think there's a lot of the, a lot of the leftover technology of the 1970s. We see stage gate systems, portfolio systems that are really things you would have seen in car companies in the early 1970s. Innovation is a convex form of value, which means um there's no data on the future, right? And so what happens is people get stuck in the planning cycle and they're very much afraid of the whole idea that we're investing in something that we don't really know what the payout is. So I think there's a lot of innovation theater that goes on and in a lot of the larger corporations what happens is that they let. More boundary-based kind of organizations, smaller organizations that cannot compete on scope or scale to do the innovation and they acquire them. So that's usually part of the basic problem until they run into an inflection event that requires them to change. No, please, a quick follow up. You, you say that companies are afraid of innovation. You said innovation fear, which is interesting because especially in tech, usually they seem as though they're promoting innovation. It doesn't seem as though there's a fear around it. Why do you think that there's a fear around it? Well, it's, it's twofold. I mean, if you think about large organizations, large organizations. Typically are protecting their rents. They're in the maintenance mode, their quarterly earnings, right? If you think about smaller companies or small cap companies, they have to differentiate themselves. So tech companies, the only reason I think tech companies have to change on a regular basis is the technology changes out so fast. Have we seen any radical new strategies in tech companies in the last 10 years? Maybe you know something I don't, but basically the development pathway looks relatively doctrinaire. Yes, what are your thoughts, you know? So I started about 10 years ago, a little more than 10 years ago to start teaching people how to think bigger. So MBA students, engineering students, literally asking them to come up with big Uh, solutions that would sort of move the needle. And I will tell you that here are the big pain points. A, we are all trained to generate solutions and ideas fast. But what is the biggest bottleneck? I mean, as Einstein put it, if I had an hour to save the planet, I'd spend the 1st 55 minutes thinking about the problem and the last 5 minutes thinking about the solution. Most people get to solutions way too fast. And so if you can get people to actually understand and spend the time, what is that pain point? Why does that pain point exist? What are going to be the barriers if you can't give people a solution that's actually implementable. And different from what already exists, it's not gonna work. Most of the thing figure ideas when I see the students, whether they're students, whether they're executives, they don't bother to even often do the basics of doing competitive analysis and being able to answer the question exactly what's the pain point and what's the value proposition. Yeah, that's all the more important in the age of AI, but we'll see circle right around that so that your jam study, Sheena, famously showed that too much choice paralyzes consumers. Uh, they find it difficult to make a decision when they surface, uh, with, with more GM options. Are there parallels inside organizations where teams generate lots of ideas but struggle to decide which ones to pursue, which ones will really deliver high impact outcomes? Yeah. So essentially I think of it as what you call it different flavors of jam, which I think are still slightly more discernible than what is it Benjamin Benjamin Morne you have over 100 different shades of white paint, and I think we do that whether it's the number. of apps on your phone or the number of ideas that are generated by all, I mean, let's face it, all of us have tons of ideas and we chat GPT you can have a lot more ideas that any given idea is worth less than maybe a penny today, but the key has to be generating more meaningful options. Yes, you want more choice, but you don't want them to be minor variations of each other. They should be meaningfully different. And I think that's true whether you're looking at the marketplace or whether you're looking at your organization. Let me play devil's advocate here, and Jeff, I'd love for you to weigh in on this. In the era of AI where the technology can generate 10,000 product concepts in 5 seconds, does human innovation still really matter? Are we over-romanticizing the necessity of human creativity? Yeah, I think there's, when we talk about AI, this is a field I started out in many, many years ago, 40 some years ago. There's really kind of 3 levels to AI, and I think we're going to the first level, which is just efficiency and quality, right? And that's going to eliminate a lot of opening jobs. It's going to eliminate a lot of that first staircase for young people, which is concerning, but it's really just doing things better, cheaper, faster, not really innovation, it's more operational efficiency. The second level of it is what we're going to call counterfactual. The whole idea that you've got an idea, what would, you know, how would you, how would you counteract this. I do a lot of work with the Department of War, and so the issue is sort of like war gaming or moot court or whatever you want to talk about. What's the other guy going to do? That's the next thing we're starting to see your blind spots. But the final level of all this is, can you use it like a muse? Can you use this to ignite, to extend? Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, abilities you have. So I want you to think about an example of this. Think about the Beatles. The Beatles have amazing talent, but they can't read music and they can't do a lot of things in production. They meet this guy, George Martin. George Martin is the great producer that makes the Beatles so famous. Well, what if the Beatles never met George Martin? Could AI be George Martin? Could, could you Bu il d a persona, develop skills in this that you don't have that would allow you to actually develop and articulate something that you couldn't otherwise. I think that's going to be the flourishing of AI. That's level 3 you said, looking at your crystal ball, how many years are we from that? Oh, we're not very far from that at all. I think we're, we're, if we're not there already, I think we're on the precipice of that. I think what we're missing is high. I want to build on what Sheena said. We're missing highly adaptive thinkers. We're missing people who deeply understand of tradecraft, deeply understand the problem, and those people are only starting to come into this third level, and I think we're going to start seeing a lot of that stuff. If not now, relatively soon. So, well, yeah, please go right ahead. I think it's important, despite all the fear that we have to recognize the human is going to always have to be in the loop. We're the only ones who can really say is this way of framing the problem or framing the question, the one that's useful because ultimately you're selling to other humans or solving a problem for other humans. We're the only ones that have to be, have to engage in that final judgment. Sure, can AI help you think through that problem? Can AI help make you smarter and searching for ways to solve that problem? Can AI make it easier for you to compare and contrast the various solutions? Absolutely, but the judgment will ultimately rest with the human. And so I think it's important to think about AI as a thought partner for us as we become not just more efficient, but we can actually become smarter and more innovative. Let me push back on that. Yes, humans have to be in the loop. What's your response when people say not as many humans have to be in the loop? You don't need as many humans relay in their judgment, their creativity to come out with innovative outcomes. Sure, I mean, yes, you are seeing we're hiring fewer people in consulting, we're hiring fewer people in investment banking, but you know what, no matter what great innovations has ever affected humans, we are very good at filling our time and coming up with new things that nobody ever else thought of that we would want. Right, I mean, whether it's new spices or clothes ways in which we want to dress or new forms of transportation, we're we're phenomenal no matter what period you look at in history, and we always scream that life is changing when something new comes on the block that everybody wants. Just, let's talk about the very corporate structures that either enable innovation or sometimes erode it. You have written and argued that real innovators tend to be heretics, uh, within, uh, institutions because they challenge routines they challenge power structures, uh, and, and, and they tend to be, they tend to think differently and push back against the comfort and logic of this is how we've all. We dumb things. Why do you think companies reject the very people who challenge them to grow? And for the HR leaders in this room, how do you protect innovators before the system forces them out? Well, there's, there's a bunch of questions in the questions. All right, well, let's start with let's start with an easy one. I have a sign that they made me take off my door at the Ross School that says organizations love innovation but hate their innovators. It's now in my office and I see people quoted all the time, innovation is a form of positive deviance. You just have to understand it's a form of variation. And so when you find your innovators, they're almost always standing at the edge of the circle. That's kind of my catchphrase for that. They're standing at the edge of the circle. They're exhibiting self-authorizing behavior. You take that away from the maintenance function of the organization, but remember the other function is growth. The only time that these people are intentionally. Integrated into the system is at two edges of the bell curve. When you're in a crisis, you're on a roll, and the reason is simple. The risk of trying something radical and the reward of staying where you're at is reversed. It's not the 80/20 rule. It's the 20/80 rule. It's easier to change 20% of an organization 80% than 80% of an organization, 20%. Here becomes the key issue. You're raising two other issues that are implied in this. Great organizations that are able to do this understand that creative tension is required for innovation. So what you're trying to do is create positive generative tension, not disrespectful, but challenging ideas, and you see this in the second thing in dynastic organizations. Take a look at the see one do one, teach one process at the University of Chicago School of Economics, the Concertaau, the All Blacks. I did a lot of interviewing when I was young with these people who built these dynastic organizations, and what you'll find. is why they share a culture and why they share an outcome. They do not share a worldview. They do not share all the same ideas and they're using this conflict constructively, not destructively, no prejudice. I'm not talking about that. The death of innovation in an organization is overalignment and apathy. If it's pushing and shoving in a respectful way, you're growing. I think every single and every single organization, whether it be for profit or not for profit, should essentially have the equivalent of Jeff's position. Which is a leader of innovation and they essentially should be tasked with two things. A, getting every single person in the organization to be able to surface a pinpoint, and B, getting every single individual to be able to surface a solution. Today, thanks to coding and its accessibility, anybody can actually code and create. A prototype and even very quickly create a proof point for it and so you should have somebody that's constantly a system by which you're constantly getting solutions with a way in which you can evaluate them and that dean of innovation should essentially be operating independently of the CEO because it's never going to be in the interest of the CEO. To make themselves obsolete. Yeah, uh, one thing I've noticed, uh, a trend is today many companies, uh, push forward hackathons, uh, and off-sites as ways to spark creativity, generate creative new ideas. Does it actually work? Uh, do these one-off events actually create a system of long-lasting innovation? It depends. I mean, there's kind of two parts to that. I built this program called the Intellectual Edge Alliance, which is 45 countries, 14 programs for the United States military, NATO, ACN brings the universities in, brings the tech companies in. There's two parts to this. One, hacking is a great idea for creating momentum and getting involvement. It doesn't. She is exactly right. It very seldom results in an outcome, in the outcome you want. The second piece you need to have they're more likely to choose the ideas that are more incremental, right? It's essentially what they find, right? They leave the billion dollar idea on the board. You're exactly right. The more interesting issue is the handoff when you go to the whole idea of operationality, and the reason is very simple. At the top of innovation, I worked on the COVID vaccine, and at the top of innovation you have to. Edge because you don't know what's going to work, so you spread out, you run little experiments that are radical, radical but small. You don't give them too much money or time. This is a round stuff. You try and burn the portfolio down as quickly as you can. The challenge is, as you move down the portfolio, things have to scale, and this is where Sheena is exactly right. There's a lot of moving parts, a lot of complexity, a lot of trade-offs you have to make. There's money, guns, and lawyers involved, right? As you move down that, as you move down that scale, the handoffs become critical. So hackathons are great, but if they don't turn into anything operationality, they're good that they create excitement and people are engaged in momentum, but they're not going to produce the outcome you're looking for. I do think that we don't train people enough as they. ideating to really identify what's that pain point, what's already out there, how are you doing it differently and what's that value proposition. If an innovator can answer those questions, I do think there's a lot, a lot more potential to create ideas that are not only more meaningful but better understood. Yeah, you know, let's take a step back. In your book Think Bigger, you laid out a six-step framework, uh, for innovation rooted in neuroscience, cognitive science, and your core idea was that creativity is not just a random, uh, movement of inspiration, and you set it as a process. That can be both learned and and structured if we look at a standard Tuesday in a corporate office, it's meetings, it's emails, it's stand up, it's town hall. So what is the specific way a team leader can restructure the work day to better optimize, uh, for creativity. So, I, I teach a method called Think bigger, and I teach it to MBAs and I teach it to executives at the Columbia Business School, um, and I will be sending around a card to people if they want to test it out, um, and essentially I think a lot of times we waste a lot of time in a company. Where there's a lot of missile we're not aligned. The communications are incomplete. If you could get people so that you actually ahead of time can use generative AI, and this is where I think generative AI can actually be helpful to. All of us, um, go into that so that we're all evening the playing field so we understand what exactly is the problem, what's already been done, what are other ways in which you can think about it, and she thinks those meetings can become much more productive. A lot of our time is spent in committee meetings that actually you're spending either the bulk of time babbelating or the bulk of time just catching each other up. Yeah, but then I look into the future, you know, for most of history, innovation was Limited by our ability to generate ideas. AI has changed that seemingly overnight. So if ideas become abundant, what becomes scarce and valuable? Yeah, this, I wrote a paper about a year ago that became very popular, and I wrote it for. West Point, the Modern War Institute, and the paper basically said the age of answers is over. Answers are not commodities, and the paper went on to say what I said was, did you notice during COVID all the big tech companies missed it? We're trying to see the future, but the tech companies that were adaptive like Zoom and GitHub were the ones that kind of got it. They kind of made sense. So to me, what, what, what becomes scarce is what Shea was saying, which is meaning. Look to young people. They're creating federations of meaning. They're trying to cure river blindness in these loose affiliations. They're creating, they're creating walkways for animals. They're doing things sort of outside the traditional industrial structure. I think that's where we're seeing the new models. I think they're organically emerging from young people who we haven't done a very good job with. We've sort of given them the short end of the stick, and I think that that's what, that's what's coming around the corner here for us. Yes, Shina, what's your closing salvo as we look to the future? I think we just like what Jeff said, I think we need to train people to ask more questions because yes answers will be generatable much more efficiently and what will really differentiate people from one another is who asks the better questions. I think I'm very expertly said Jeff, Sheena, thank you so much for this conversation, super insightful. Thank you so much Ruth.