I by IMD Book Club
Growth
Why scaling innovation is so damn hard
Harvard’s Linda Hill explains why scaling innovation means leaning into friction, learning to love uncertainty – and knowing when to kill your project....
Got a breakthrough idea? That’s the easy part. Harvard’s Linda Hill explains why scaling innovation means leaning into friction, learning to love uncertainty – and knowing when to kill your project.
Everyone has a 'slice of genius' waiting to be unleashed and harnessed for the collective good.Linda Hill, co-author of Genius at Scale
Plenty of companies drum up good business ideas, but precious few scale them to the point of commercial success. Amplifying innovation is a Sisyphean task, and it forms the focus of Harvard professor Linda Hill’s newest co-authored book: Genius at Scale – How Great Leaders Drive Innovation.
In an IMD Book Club conversation, Hill said the stakes are only ratcheting up: innovation is no longer optional, and every company now needs to innovate relentlessly just to stay competitive.
Why good ideas die
So why do so many good ideas fail to scale? “Too often, organizations still think that only some of the people in our organization are the innovators, and the rest of us are ‘the executors’,” Hill said. “So when the innovators come up with an idea and try to pass it on to the rest of the organization, they often reject [it] because scaling it requires them to be innovators too, but their metrics don’t reward them for doing so.”
Even OpenAI – which helped ignite the generative AI boom – struggles with this, Hill said. One former frontier lab boss at the ChatGPT maker told her his team could churn out breakthrough ideas en masse, but getting the rest of the organization to adopt or scale them was an uphill battle.
The book’s first lesson, then, is that innovation is everyone’s business. Hill said most of us now understand that it is a team sport but few know how to actually play as a team. “We don’t like to take on risks with people unless we really know them, unless we really trust them… So unless you’ve built those connections across the organization, nothing comes of it.”
But that, inevitably, brings office politics into play. “All organizations are inherently political,” Hill said. “Getting an idea off the ground often means managing the politics, and winning over people for whom you don’t have formal authority, in other teams, departments, even organizations.”
Even with the politics sorted, innovation seldom follows a straight line.
Learn to love the fog
Even with the politics sorted, innovation seldom follows a straight line. But it does not need a clear roadmap. Hill draws a distinction between “pathfinders”, who follow a set plan, and “wayfinders”, who change course as they go along.
“You cannot tell people to innovate,” she said. “You can only create the conditions required for them to be willing and able to want to co-create the future with you. And co-creation is very different than followership.”
She added the more groundbreaking the innovation, the foggier the way forward is. So how do you lead innovation if you’re flying blind? She compares it to orchestrating a jazz band: everyone plays in the same key, sticks to the same tempo and shared structure — but still has freedom to improvise.
That freedom still needs some structure, however. One factor that can drag progress to a crawl is confusion over who makes the calls, she said. “If decision rights are not clear, everything gets slowed down.”
Innovation also thrives, illogically, on friction. Hill dubs it “creative abrasion”: stuffing different points of view in a room and letting them collide. But people often hold back, making psychological safety paramount.
And experimentation only works if companies are willing to let some ideas
die.
Know when to kill ideas
And experimentation only works if companies are willing to let some ideas die. In one novel example, Hill cited a chief executive who actually paid employees to mothball their own projects. “They had what they referred to as ‘walking zombies’. They started to experiment, but then they didn’t kill any of the experiments and they didn’t have resources to go back and do the right experiments.”
This means, she added, “fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”
But that leaves innovators walking a tightrope between knowing when to push on and when to pull the plug. The challenge is to balance conviction with openness: innovators need enough belief in their ideas to persevere through setbacks, while remaining willing to learn, adapt, or ultimately let an idea go.
That means failure is often baked into the innovation process, but accepting it is much easier said than done. At consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, Hill said there was “a deep fear” that experimentation could be “career-ending”, prompting the US group to rethink how performance was measured and rewarded.
Risk is the other side of that equation. The trouble is nobody wants to admit their project is risky, and people have different appetites for it: some rapacious, some feeble. “If you’re going to be able to innovate, you actually need to come up with some case law in your setting for how much risk are we going to be willing to take on.” She suggested speaking about “complexity” rather than “risk” to leap over this hurdle.
That’s not to say that such leaders are beyond reproach; you also need to bolt some guardrails on innovation projects. Hill explained: “You can’t empower people to innovate if they’re not going to be held accountable in some way for what they’re doing. So with freedom should come accountability and a sense of responsibility.”
The ABCs of scaling innovation
Hill distills it down to three roles called the “ABCs”. Those comprise “architects”, who fashion the culture and capabilities for everyone else to experiment and learn from. “Bridgers” forge partnerships with outside organizations to tap talent and fresh tools. And “catalysts” spawn movements that spread innovation across an entire ecosystem.
One example, Hill said, comes from Delta Airline’s drive to craft biometric boarding passes. The US carrier joined forces with an external company to bring in the expertise it needed to get the project off the ground. And it worked: a prototype was up and running in 90 days.
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