Last Updated on 21 October 2025 at 09:31

A few months ago, I published an article on innovation. The title of the article was: “Innovation’s worst enemy is … the desire to innovate at all costs” https://blogs.letemps.ch/elena-debbaut/2019/01/18/le-pire-ennemi-de-linnovation-est-lenvie-dinnover-a-tout-prix/

The article’s central idea was to argue that innovation is, above all, a process. Its main purpose was to briefly clarify the concept of innovation, the difference between the initial brainstorming/idea phase and the operational phase, and the impact of innovation (and its process) on the company’s existence.

This article goes back to some of the concepts briefly mentioned earlier in a more advanced way. This article does not pretend to be exhaustive on such a complex subject as innovation and the innovation process, but it launches a debate that allows us to approach this subject like any other operational process that exists within a company.

Innovation cannot be reduced to creative activity alone

Most people associate innovation with

The innovation process

The truth is that companies that succeed in innovating are those that

solve a problem and follow a repeatable process to market.

For example, a fashion designer follows a process to develop his initial ideas into a product that is perceived as innovative and perhaps trend-setting for the season. In a similar way, companies can also come up with initial ideas, validate them and bring them to market.

On the other hand, it should be noted that innovation, as a whole, is not a fixed process. The initial technological, financial and market conditions are changing faster and faster. Thus, a company must be fast and efficient enough to manage the usual business activities on the one hand and experiment with innovation on the other. This is the famous“run the business & change the business“.

There is no precise method, no tactics or tools, and even less a ready-made recipe for this innovation process. Each company will have to find its own way.

Misconceptions about innovation

A company’s investment of resources and time could yield a better return if the usual mistakes are detected in good time, and this is before launching a strategy that encompasses research and innovation.

Here is a short list of misconceptions about innovation.

1. Innovation is a simple process

Innovation is not a “simple” process.

In my experience in turning around troubled companies and projects, it is a complex process with

2. Innovation is all about ideas

Innovation is not just ideas.

There is this false perception that the innovator just comes up with ideas all day long … and that it is up to others to implement it technically and to take care of them to make them viable. Moreover, it is not uncommon to find great pride in the lack of financial responsibility, operational follow-up, control and accountability.

Reducing the process to the first and only “brainstorming-ideas” stage is not innovation. In the context of a company, this initial “brainstorming-ideas” phase can be found in the entire innovation process (conceptualisation, R&D, testing, ROI analysis).

3. Innovation does not have to take into account the needs of the market

The market is always looking for innovation, and so are the customers. But there is a fine line between ignoring market needs and intuition about a revolutionary product or service.

A famous quote about black cars and horses often comes up as an answer to explain the lack of listening to the market: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked me for a faster horse”.

But the bottom line is that Henry Ford changed his mind after

4. Criticising innovation is not supporting it

This is a false belief of which

5. It is enough to have an almost unlimited budget to be able to innovate

To innovate, you must not create a financial abyss.

Innovative companies are not short of ideas, but they must

6. Innovation should not be linked to ROI

Innovation is linked to the return on the initial investment while controlling the risks (strategic, operational, financial). This is a sound practice for a good manager/entrepreneur/investor.

By improving the operations and, therefore, the company’s profits, it can reinvest in other activities and explore other ideas. Perhaps these iterative steps are not as attractive as the actual innovation, but it has the merit of creating a virtuous circle that encourages even more innovation.

So yes, ROI is important.

Despite this, ROI is falsely perceived as a punitive instrument.

So famous innovators will go off to start their own businesses. Welcome entrepreneurs to the real world, where ROI even dictates the purchase of a pen or hiring a secretary to answer the phone, leaving the innovator to think about his ideas in peace. However, forgetting about ROI means forgetting that innovation remains a long process, with multiple iterations, validations, and many unknown results without guarantees.

This is how ROI (return on investment) turns into RIP (may he rest in peace).

7. To innovate, all you need to do is read one or more blog posts, read one or more books and take a training course

The purpose of a blog post is not to cover all the concepts and methods related to this complex subject

8. To innovate, it is enough to imitate and take the example of a few large companies or CEOs with global success

Presenting an idea and wanting to

9. To innovate, you just have to start without any operational and financial planning

There is some truth in this perception.

Indeed, innovation is a process with an unknown outcome. But planning

Conclusion

You may have noticed that the usual image to illustrate the concept of innovation is a light bulb going on. This perception perfectly reflects the way of conceiving innovation as a kind of magic limited to a single initial point. But this overlooks the fact that innovation results from a whole team of talent, engineering, advanced techniques, analysis, testing, and lessons learned.

Conceiving of innovation as the work of one person is a reductive approach that only increases the failure rate due to lack of experience and methodological approach to innovation.

Innovation is not a one-off event that happens by chance in the“idea generation department“. On the contrary, innovation is the whole company’s business; good ideas can come from anywhere. As for validation and market introduction, this is a long-term job with several stages that take time.

Innovation is more like a set of light bulbs that light up in harmony, a whole circuit (seen as a process) controlled by one or more switches (safeguards). An“innovative by design” company manages to create this circuit, which it uses and reuses when the need arises

Yes, innovation is, above all, a process.

Get the process right, and innovation will follow.

Note: this article first appeared on the blog of LeTemps newspaper in the “Business” section. It has been reproduced here entirely.