Nobody gets fired for following an innovation pipeline

In the world of corporate innovation, there’s a parallel that rings with the same fatalistic undertone as “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.” You're not going to be fired for running an innovation pipeline. It sounds harmless, but underneath, we have the same play-safe logic from most innovation initiatives: they are designed to avoid failure rather than court success.

Playing it safe, aren't we?

At its core, this mindset reflects the same risk aversion that drove organizations to buy legacy solutions like IBM in the face of better alternatives. Companies launch “safe” innovation programs designed around a pipeline with stop-gates and go / go-no-goes—innovation labs, hackathons, or idea challenges—not to change the game but to ensure no one will be blamed for failure. There's a process to follow; the initiative looks good on the quarterly report and pleases the board.

Sure, it's not designed to produce any real breakthrough, but breakthroughs are dangerous anyway, right? How much trouble would you be if your innovation program inadvertently discovered an amazing way to make your current business obsolete? Who wants to explain this to the top management and hope anything will be born out of this?

No. Let's play safe. Pipelines deliver incremental innovation, which is the most innovation any typical company really wants to deal with.

Innovation pipelines are also often excellent at making no one really responsible for anything. There are steps, committees, juries, internal or external consultants, and every bit of decision-making is sliced down to a finite part of the process and spread around. No one has central ownership. If you think about it, it is also because no one believes this approach could achieve tremendous success. It’s the corporate equivalent of the NASA janitor claiming to be putting a man on the moon—but with none of the belief.

That's what is increasingly dubbed innovation theater—a lot of activity and showmanship with glamourous events but no meaningful outcomes.

Culture, culture, culture

Even when the innovation management selects projects to be pushed into their pipeline process, they usually make sure to only select safe bets. Big bets come with visible failures, and failures don’t win bonuses. The “nobody gets fired” mentality creates a cycle of mediocrity at every step, where the fear of losing one’s job ensures no one actually excels at it.

And with this, I'm not blaming innovation teams. The reality is that despite the buzzwords plastered across mission statements, most organizations are profoundly unsafe spaces for bold decision-making. The more you see talks about big leaps, risk-taking, and so on, the less it's done–or even desired.

It's cultural. Employees instinctively understand that taking real risks in an innovation program could backfire on their careers. They learn to hedge, to pick projects with guaranteed ROI, and to avoid the “what if” ideas that might truly move the needle. If no framework makes risk not only acceptable but the default mode, there is no innovation—just maintenance.

Think about any corporate intrapreneurship program you know of. What are the chances for a remarkably successful intrapreneur becoming a multi-millionaire out of a ground-breaking success? You can exactly correlate how much an intrapreneur could possibly gain as a result of such a program to the level of innovation that is at play in the whole company.

Safe is unsafe

Proper innovation can rarely be delivered out of an innovation pipeline because such a process is the equivalent of an IBM choice. It will keep everyone safe for so long that, eventually, your company will become fragile. Market resilience is built by dealing with risks, choices from the current safe business paradigm, and regular acceptable shocks to your cultural system that will keep you awake and opportunistic.