Hiring a Director of Innovation Might Be Your Biggest Mistake
I’ve worked with companies across industries trying to build innovation into their culture. It’s not easy. If your business doesn’t already have a clear strategy, supportive culture, and the right processes, building innovation from scratch takes real focus and commitment.
A common move is to hire a Director of Innovation and give them a small team. That’s a smart starting point; innovation needs long-term attention and people who are responsible for making it happen. But here’s the mistake: too many leaders think hiring someone to “own” innovation is enough. It’s not. And if that’s all you do, it could create more problems than progress.
Many companies treat innovation like a side project. It becomes a small team off to the side, a fancy “lab,” or a quarterly brainstorm in a room with whiteboards and beanbag chairs. But real innovation isn’t a project or a place – it’s a mindset. It’s a decision-making discipline that should guide how your whole company works, every single day.
If you want to grow, adapt quickly, and thrive in a fast-changing world, innovation can’t belong to one person or team. You have to build it into the way your entire organization thinks, plans, and acts. That means everyone, from marketing to finance to ops, needs to feel responsible for finding new ways to improve and create value. It needs to change from something that a few people do occasionally, to something that everyone is paying attention to daily.
To be clear, the Director of Innovation is still a key role. Someone needs to lead the charge, drive the strategy, and be accountable for progress. But for companies with even 50+ people, innovation is too big for one person to manage alone.
So how do you turn innovation into a shared mindset and not just a job title?
Here are four best practices:
1. Define Innovation as a Behavior, Not a Buzzword
Ask five people what innovation means, and you’ll get six answers. That’s a problem. You need a clear, shared definition. For example: “increasing efficiency without decreasing quality” or “finding more valuable and profitable ways to serve our customers.” However you say it, keep it clear, concise, and consistent so everyone knows what it means to be innovative.
2. Make Innovation Your Core Growth Model
Don’t treat innovation as separate from business goals. It should drive your growth. If your 3- or 5-year plan is just “do more of the same,” you’re playing it too safe. Make innovation the engine behind how you grow revenue, expand your offerings, or improve the customer experience.
3. Empower Innovation Cross-Functionally
Innovation is not just a marketing thing. It’s not about catchy names or big ideas alone; it’s about creating and capturing value. The best ideas often come when people from different functions work together. Bring in voices from product, HR, finance, sales, and operations. Cross-functional collaboration leads to better ideas and faster learning.
4. Create Incentives that Reward Innovation
If your culture punishes failure, innovation will never take hold. Build a culture that celebrates smart, thoughtful risks – even when they don’t work out. Recognize teams that experiment, learn, and improve. Failing small and early is part of the process. What matters is learning and applying that insight next time.
Innovation isn’t a department or a title. It’s a way of thinking, making decisions, and taking calculated risks that everyone should play a part in. It’s more than a single team or person can do on their own. If you want innovation to stick, don’t isolate it – embed it into the way people work every day.
