“Innovation” is starting to become a buzzword. From keynote speeches to strategic plans, we hear the word thrown around so often that it now risks losing its meaning. If you were to ask 10 executives to define innovation, you’ll get 10 different answers, most of them vague and unhelpful.
That vagueness isn’t an accident. Innovation is hard to do, and it’s easier to celebrate in retrospect than to execute in real time. In my experience, most conversations about innovation skip past the truths that actually determine which companies and leaders succeed. Let’s explore the top three secrets of innovation.
1. BEING AN INNOVATOR IS A PHENOTYPE
The first secret is that no matter how hard you try, you can’t install innovation in an individual. At its core, being an innovator is a personality trait, a way of seeing problems that some people have and others simply don’t.
I call it a phenotype: a set of traits that shows up in how a person operates under pressure. If you’re an innovator, you’re focused on disrupting norms. You’re not content with the status quo, and you’d rather relentlessly pursue the “why.” You’re also going to have a high tolerance for risk, but not recklessness. Reckless leaders ignore risk altogether. Innovative leaders see it clearly, weigh it honestly, and choose to move forward anyway because the cost of standing still is higher.
This has real implications for how you encourage corporate innovation. If a business culture punishes failure, rewards consensus, and optimizes for stability, it’s working against the people who could move that company forward. For innovation, you need room to breathe and a team that knows their leader has their backs.
2. VELOCITY IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY
The belief that more information leads to better decisions is common, but in fast-moving environments, the ability to decide quickly with incomplete information often matters far more than the ability to decide perfectly and slowly. At Paragonix, we saw this when developing our organ preservation technology. Without competition to benchmark against, it felt like we were making every decision blind. What kept us going was the willingness to decide, execute, and adjust in real time.
This also points to a counterintuitive truth: In the early stages, try to ignore your competitors. When you’re building something genuinely new, your competitors are likely still solving yesterday’s problems. Benchmarking against them too early risks producing a slightly better version of something that already exists. An innovator’s goal is to build toward what should be, not just what already is.
3. FAILURE IS NECESSARY FOR INNOVATION
A company that never fails is simply maintaining boundaries, not pushing them. Real risk is where real innovation lives, which means that sometimes you won’t make your shot.
The key is learning to fail the right way. There’s a meaningful difference between high-cost failure—committing enormous resources before testing viability—and low-cost failure, which means designing small, fast experiments that answer critical questions early. When being innovative, take big swings on vision and small steps on execution, asking early and often about the signs that something isn’t working. Most importantly, pay attention to the answer.
Companies with a low failure rate in innovation have not driven innovation effectively. Companies may see high failure rates as a negative, but these failure rates are only a negative if they:
- Don’t fail fast enough
- Don’t learn from those failures
- Spend too much money failing
Failing well also means treating a failed experiment as data rather than defeat. When you feel safe saying “this isn’t working, but here’s what I learned,” you’re part of a culture that drives innovation and allows the most meaningful breakthroughs.
WHAT AN INNOVATIVE COMPANY LOOKS LIKE
In some ways, innovation is a disposition. It requires discipline and a willingness to take risks. The companies making real progress don’t treat innovation as a buzzword, but embrace calculated risk. They remain agile in decision-making and push forward no matter what. They also hire the right phenotype.
Lisa Anderson is cofounder and president of Paragonix Technologies.