Why winning the innovation race requires more than just speed of action

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, businesses are in a constant race to innovate. The pressure to stay ahead (or at least not fall behind) is relentless. Leaders must navigate a challenging duality: the need for rapid action versus the responsibility to their teams, regulators, customers, and long-term strategic goals.

At the core of this race is a stark truth: the next "impossible" thing in your industry will be invented. The only question is whether it be by you, or your competition? That’s why the real game we’re in is not just about innovation itself, but speed.

Speed provides the competitive advantage. It defines how quickly you can sense change, see opportunities, conceive new solutions, and execute them. It influences decision-making, risk appetite, and the ultimate quality of your ideas. Increasingly, the measure of a good idea isn’t just its originality, it’s how fast you can make it real.

So how can leaders succeed in this race to innovate?

Breaking assumptions and the power of open collaboration

Some of the most significant breakthroughs occur when organisations are willing to challenge deeply held assumptions. Particularly the belief that innovation must come solely from within. Increasingly, forward-thinking companies are embracing open innovation models, sharing their toughest problems externally and tapping into global networks of expertise.

Platforms like InnoCentive exemplify this shift. Developed with seed funding from Eli Lilly, the platform enables organizations to post complex scientific or technical challenges and offer financial rewards to anyone who can solve them. This approach has helped solve problems that had previously stalled inside organizations for months, or even years.

One example illustrates this well: a development organisation had struggled with a particular problem for eight years. Yet, by adopting a new and innovative approach, they found a solution within weeks. The breakthrough came after making two critical mindset shifts:

• Transparency: Being open about the challenges they faced, admitting they didn't have the answers, and publicly sharing what they were working on.
• Openness to external ideas: Recognizing that valuable solutions can come from outside the organisation, and accepting the possibility that others-perhaps scientists elsewhere in the world-might already have the answer.

These shifts can be uncomfortable because they challenge traditional notions of control, expertise, and even identity. But they’re increasingly essential. In the race to innovate, speed and adaptability often come from collaborating beyond your boundaries.

The organisations that thrive in this new environment are those that reframe innovation not as a solo pursuit, but one where the winning edge comes from learning faster, not knowing more.

The unexpected power of boundaries in innovation

While openness is key, paradoxically, boundaries also unlock innovation. As Amy Purdy explores in her TED Talk, Living Beyond Limits, boundaries can act as springboards. As she puts it, “Our borders and our obstacles can only do two things: stop us in our tracks, or force us to get creative.”

In business, boundaries, whether posed by regulation, technology limitations, resource scarcity, or shifting market conditions, often define the edge of our current reality. But they also illuminate where imagination must take over.

Rather than seeing constraints as blockers, the most innovative teams treat them as design challenges and as prompts that encourage new thinking. Boundaries can sharpen focus and often lead to more elegant, sustainable breakthroughs.

The question leaders must ask is not just what’s possible, but “What are the assumptions we’re holding and what might we create if we broke them?”

By reframing constraints as creative fuel, organizations can move from a reactive stance to a truly generative one where innovation thrives not in spite of boundaries, but because of them.

Navigating pitfalls in the race to innovate

In the pursuit of speed, it’s easy for innovation to veer off course. The mindset of “move fast and break things” may create momentum, but without purpose or discipline, it can just as easily lead to costly missteps. Innovation should be bold, but it must also be thoughtful.

A common pitfall is products or ideas pushed out quickly without a strong underlying foundation. The problem isn’t speed itself; it’s speed without foresight. If you build a quick solution with only short-term needs in mind, you may find later that it can’t support the weight of what the business ultimately needs to deliver. It’s like constructing a garage, later deciding to add a second floor, only to discover the foundations weren’t built to support it.

True innovation demands discipline and competence, even in experimentation. Teams should be encouraged to test and iterate, but not at the expense of quality or accountability. It’s not about tolerating failure for its own sake, it’s about learning quickly and responsibly.

This also requires leaders to navigate inherent tensions or polarities that come with the territory of innovation. These aren’t problems to solve, but forces to balance. You need to deliver on today’s commitments while remaining ambitious about what’s next. You must hold both the big picture and the operational detail. You have to inspire with vision, while staying grounded in reality.

When innovation efforts fall short, it’s often because one side of that tension has been overplayed. Vision without delivery, ambition without structure, or experimentation without rigor. Success lies in the ability to maintain these tensions and build a culture that supports this dynamic way of working.

Agile decision-making as a cultural imperative

Accelerating innovation doesn’t just require new ideas. It requires faster, sharper decisions. Many organisations try to address this through process improvements: clearer roles, escalation paths, decision frameworks, and new operating procedures. But these efforts often fall short because they only address the surface. The deeper challenge lies not in how decisions are structured, but in how they’re shaped by people’s underlying beliefs, assumptions, and mental models.

If the way people see problems, interpret risks, or value speed hasn’t changed, then no amount of procedural clarity will unlock truly agile decision-making. A meaningful shift in how decisions are made requires a cultural shift that reorients how people think, not just how they act.

This is especially critical in complex industries, like drug development, where thousands of small decisions shape outcomes. In these environments, the quality and pace of decision-making can be the difference between leading the market and falling behind.

Ultimately, the race to innovate is not just about new tools or faster workflows. It’s about cultivating the cultural conditions that enable people to move quickly, think boldly, collaborate openly, and act with clarity even in uncertainty.

As Marcel Proust said: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Real understanding begins when we change our perspective, not just our view.

If you're navigating these challenges and want to move faster with greater clarity, get in touch to start the conversation.

Published 01/07/2025