We are excited to welcome Ross Pearce to the MBIL (Master of Business Innovation & Leadership) programme sharing his insights, deep understanding & experience on innovation with our students. Ross recently wrote a book titled: Innovation Distilled: Distilling decades of real-world practice into clear truths, guiding leaders to create what truly matters, faster, and with confidence.
There’s a blunt truth every board and SLT (senior leadership team) should keep taped to their monitor: if the market is learning faster than you are, you’re already behind. The antidote isn’t more brainstorming; it’s treating innovation as the discipline of creating value, deliberate, teachable, and measurable. Today, the majority of enterprise value is intangible; brand, data, software, customer trust, culture. Those assets aren’t “nice to have”; they’re the growth engine. And what builds them? Not ad-hoc projects, but a systematic innovation muscle that turns insight into IP, experiences into brand equity, and usage into proprietary data loops.
Breakthroughs rarely fit annual reporting cycles. When you force them to, you select for incrementalism and quietly starve the future. Separate the governance and funding logic for core, adjacent, and transformational work; measure early bets on learning velocity, not EBIT.
Pro tip: protect a portfolio mix (roughly 50/30/20 across incremental /adjacent / transformational) and tie staged investment to de-risking milestones, not slideware ambition.
An innovation strategy is a specific, testable answer to: where will we play, how will we win, and what unique capabilities will we build to make that real? It aligns board, SLT, and teams on:
When explicit, it prevents portfolio drift, protects multi-year bets from annual budgeting gravity, and gives teams permission to learn fast where it matters.
Strategy without focus is just aspiration. Focus is the economic choice to pursue a few critical opportunities and deliberately say no to the rest. The payoff:
Practical tells you’re focused: a kill list (what you’ll stop), a visible “Not Now” backlog, and a balanced portfolio cap on incremental, adjacent and transformational opportunities.
All innovation is a human-to-human value exchange. Ask better questions, build trust, learn fast, and stay relentlessly anchored in who you serve. That mindset turns “projects” into outcomes people feel and that businesses can scale.
Transformational innovation dies in low-trust, high-control environments. Psychological safety, transparency, and distributed decisions aren’t “soft” they’re the preconditions for speed of learning and quality of judgment. Design for them on purpose.
The modern innovation leader’s job is to set the stage, not perform on it. Influence beats authority: coalition-building, framing, storytelling, and giving credit create the conditions where people choose to contribute. That’s how you unlock cross-functional intelligence at scale.
Desirability–Viability–Feasibility remains table stakes, but it’s incomplete. Add Ethics: environmental impact, human rights, legality, and responsible AI to your evaluation gates. It reduces downside risk, strengthens brand trust, aligns with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) expectations, and is fast becoming a market discriminator. Bake it into every charter and review.
To operationalise innovation effectively, organisations can take five immediate steps. First, clarify the value discipline by publishing an innovation strategy and principles, supported by a few critical metrics such as learning velocity, problem–solution fit, and option value, and make these visible at board level. Second, separate time horizons by establishing a ring-fenced governance stream for multi-year bets with staged funding. Third, embed ethics into practice by codifying DVFE—ensuring templates, gates, and investment memos consistently assess desirability, viability, feasibility, and ethics. Fourth, design for trust by creating psychological safety rituals such as retrospectives, red-team reviews, and “failure as learning” debriefs, while enabling decision-making at the edges. Finally, empower facilitative leaders by training them to influence without authority, listen deeply, frame challenges effectively, and celebrate shared wins.
Innovation should be treated as a disciplined, human-centred practice rather than a sporadic activity. It requires governance that differs from business-as-usual, intelligent measurement that captures what truly matters, and leadership built on trust. When approached this way, innovation generates the kind of compounding, intangible value that is both market-rewarded and deeply resonant with people.
