When we think of innovation we tend to focus on how to come up with great ideas. We love stories of accidental genius—a weak adhesive becoming the Post-it Note, or a wall cleaner that kids liked playing with becoming Play-Doh. We're conditioned to wait for a random stroke of brilliance, and to believe we aren’t innovative if those a-ha moments never come.

But good ideas aren't enough. Kodak prototyped the first digital camera but shelved the project over fears it would disrupt its core film business. Google launched the first "smart glasses," but failed on product marketing and market readiness.

It’s not just about having great ideas. You need a full innovation system to ensure you’re working on the right ideas and that they benefit from the right conditions to succeed.

Building Your Innovation Powertrain

I urge leaders to think of their innovation system as a vehicle powertrain. A powertrain is the system that generates and delivers power to move a vehicle. It's a set of interconnected components that need to work well together to get you where you need to go. Here are the 7 key components

1. Innovation Strategy: Think of this as the brain of your innovation system. It behaves a lot like an engine control unit. Innovation strategy must be tightly integrated with the overall vision and objectives for your organization.  Innovation leaders are responsible for translating this vision into clear innovation direction. This alignment is critical: Innovations that clearly serve corporate objectives are far easier to adopt and scale. To maximize freedom and transformative ideas, innovation strategy should focus on outcomes, not outputs, which allows teams to be more creative in how they achieve their goals. It's also the leader's job to tell the story of how innovation efforts are enabling or accelerating the overall corporate strategy. This helps to justify their value, especially when ROI is uncertain or far off.
2. Trend Sensing: These are vehicle and environmental sensors that feed information to the "engine control unit," your innovation strategy. It involves two key types of sensing:
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   • Internal Sensing requires you to systematically analyze customer feedback as a data set, meeting with sales and customer success teams to see what they're hearing, and looking for internal process innovation opportunities.
   • External Sensing must be intentional and systematic. It involves tracking external trend reports, monitoring academic research, using conferences to spot industry shifts, looking at adjacent industries, and meeting with innovation ecosystem conveners.
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     The final step is to regularly analyze this trend data to inform your strategy. Be sure to map out what you're hearing, where it might be leading, what it means for your organization, and what you plan to do about it.
3. Process & Governance : Much like an engine block, this is the structured process that guides innovation. It must clearly outline how ideas are surfaced, how you decide which ones to pursue, and how you measure success versus when to "pull the plug."  Innovation leaders must ensure this process works effectively, consistently, and with the right support for innovators at every stage. How well this system works directly impacts your innovation culture. It should be easy, accessible, and exciting for people to use. A great process and governance system must include ways to easily adopt and expand new ideas across the entire organization.
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4. Innovators: Consider these the pistons doing work in the engine. You need two types:
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   • Open Innovation embraces the idea that great ideas can come from anywhere. Not everyone will be an innovator, but those interested must be enabled with clear pathways to your process, access to tools, and meaningful recognition.
   • Dedicated Innovation Resources have a specific mandate and are given the time, space, and insulation to focus on more complex emerging and disruptive innovations that require a longer-term view.
5. Innovation Feedback Loop: Just as engine sensors give you feedback on how well the engine’s working, your innovation feedback loop acts as the sensor for your powertrain. This feedback must happen in two ways:
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   • It requires ongoing engagement from innovation leaders, who must cross-functionally and regularly solicit and share learnings with other leaders and departments;
   • This leadership engagement is supplemented by more formal sharing pathways, like cross-functional events or innovation summits. These forums should share the results and learnings from all innovation projects. Not just the successes, but also the failures.
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     This feedback should cover user learnings, market learnings, problem learnings, and process learnings. Transparency is essential. It demonstrates and reinforces the organization's culture of innovation.
6. Partnerships: You can't do it all alone; partnerships act as a 'turbo charger' for your powertrain. They help you:
   • Accelerate getting to market faster by leveraging a partner's tech or customers;
   • Access new expertise or funding;
   • Amortize R&D costs across multiple organizations to de-risk investment;
   • And amplify your brand and industry leadership.
     This shouldn't be a side-of-desk task. Partner on things central to your strategy, especially for pre-competitive problems, market creation, or building shared infrastructure. Look beyond obvious peers to include startups, academics, ecosystem conveners, and public sector partners.
7. A Culture of Innovation: This is the fuel that makes the engine run; a great powertrain is useless without it. This culture isn't a given. It must be intentionally built and consistently reinforced. It is a product of four key factors:
   • Skills for innovation (providing training to build skills and mindsets);
   • Learnings (sharing trends, insights, and results across the organization);
   • Experimentation (giving teams time, space, and the expectation that it's okay to fail as long as you learn);
   • Excitement (getting people fired up about the potential of innovation and sharing success stories).
     Consistent effort and committed leadership transform reluctant cultures into highly engaged ones. Beware: a broken innovation system will "leak fuel" and lose momentum.

The Future of Innovation is Systematic

The future of innovation isn't about waiting for a lucky idea. It's about intentionally building a high-performance system that can generate and execute great ideas, time and time again. This powertrain metaphor highlights the most critical part: integration. A failure in one component leads to a failure of the whole machine. A world-class culture is useless if your process is broken; it just burns up without creating forward motion. A brilliant strategy is worthless if your innovators aren't engaged or enabled. A powerful partnership can't help if the core engine can't handle the injection of new ideas.  The organizations that win the future won’t be those who get "lucky." They’ll be the ones who intentionally build, maintain, and tune their innovation powertrain, treating innovation as the core, systematic capability it is.

How well is your engine running?

For more information on how NorthGuide helps organizations build sustainable competitive advantage through purposeful innovation, please contact sarah@northguide.ca.