Many promising ideas lose energy between the first moment of enthusiasm and the reality of execution, says Abdelmoula El Hadi, Group Head of Innovation at Knauf Insulation. This is especially true in complex industrial and B2B environments, where innovation has to move through many layers – technical validation, production feasibility, certification, quality, investment decisions – before it becomes a reality.
In his book The Creativity Paradox, Abdelmoula describe this transition from creative chaos to structured execution as the moment where innovation efforts are often won or lost. We asked him to share how his experiences have shaped this view and how innovation managers can overcome the challenges.
The Creativity Paradox
Progressive organisations need to do two things at the same time. Create space for exploration, while also delivering performance and predictability and those activities do not always operate with the same rhythm.
Creativity needs openness, curiosity and time to explore. Execution needs focus, evidence and control. If we only protect creativity, we get dispersion. And if we only protect control, we kill learning too early.
This tension I describe as the Creativity Paradox and it shows up in daily decisions:
- How much freedom do we give a team before asking for a business case?
- How fast can we move without bypassing critical risk controls?
- When do we protect an idea and when do we challenge it?
- Who owns the problem once the first idea changes?
Individuals often leave workshops with good energy and good concepts, only for the momentum to disappear a few weeks later.
It is often, not that the ideas were judged poor, but that no one had designed the next steps: who validates the idea, who owns the risk, who speaks to the customer, who checks the feasibility, who decides whether it deserves more resources, etc.? All in all, who can drive the first version of the MVP (Minimal Viable Product).
This is why I believe many organisations do not only need more creativity. They need to find a better way to carry creativity forward… into the execution.
Three critical causes of innovation failure
In my experience, the breakdown often appears in a few recurring moments. They do not always happen in this order and they are not the only causes of innovation failure, but they are patterns I have seen many times.
- Structure arrives too early, or too late
- Ownership becomes unclear
- Insufficient testing in a ‘real’ environment
1. Structure needs to be appropriate to the life-stage
Early-stage ideas need structure, but not the same structure as mature projects.
Problems appear when the same logic used to approve a mature capital project is applied too early to an idea that still needs exploration. At that point, the discussion moves too quickly from: “What do we still need to learn?” to: “Can you already prove the full return?” The idea then becomes something to justify before it has had enough time to mature.
I am not saying that governance, KPIs or business cases are the problem. In industrial organisations, governance is essential. It protects quality, safety, resources and credibility, but timing is crucial.
The issue is not structure versus no structure. It is about the maturity of the idea and the type of structure we apply to it.
Case-study: When structure arrives too late
Sometimes teams move too fast and treat governance as an administrative formality rather than a real decision point.
I once saw this in a new product launch under strong time pressure for a specific market. The team wanted to keep momentum, so some project gate checks were treated more like boxes to tick than moments to stop and think. One of those checks involved packaging and regulatory labelling. It looked like a small detail but it was mandatory for market access.
Because the deeper review was skipped, the issue was discovered very late when finished goods were already prepared. The product could not legally enter that specific market without the correct label. What followed was redesign, reprinting, revalidation and months of delay.
The idea itself was not the problem. The problem was speed without the right discipline at the right moment.
2. Everyone supports the idea in principle but no one is fully accountable for the next step
As ideas move across functions: innovation, R&D, marketing, operations, sustainability, finance, legal, certification… they often lose clarity as each function has its own risk profile. R&D are concerned about technical feasibility, operations about production complexity, marketing about customer relevance, finance about return and regulatory teams about compliance.
This is one of the most frustrating moments in innovation because on the surface there is no obvious resistance. People are not saying “no”. In fact, they often agree that the idea is promising. The difficulty is that agreement does not automatically create movement.
This is where organisational friction appears:
- Decisions take longer because every function sees a different risk.
- Teams optimise for their own priorities as each function tries to protect what it is accountable for.
- The idea moves from one team to another but without enough clarity on what has already been learned, what still needs to be tested and who should drive the next step.
- The idea becomes “interesting” but not urgent. It remains on the agenda but it does not become part of anyone’s real workload, objectives, or resource plan.
- People agree in the meeting but no one changes their plan afterwards.
In practice, this means the idea dies through slow loss of ownership.
Innovation is cross-functional by nature but many organisations still manage it through functional logic. That creates tension.
3. Insufficient testing in the real world
A concept that looks attractive in a workshop, can still fail later because nobody has tested how it will behave in the real environment. For an industrial environment this includes: production constraints, quality requirements, certification, customer expectations, cost pressure, operational routines and sales readiness.
At some point, the idea has to meet reality: customers, plants, installers, operators, engineers, sales teams. That is where it becomes stronger, changes shape or sometimes dies for the right reasons.
Case-study: Creating a learning environment
One example I often think (and talk) about is a plant where experimentation was not treated as an exception.
The plant manager created planned “safe test windows” in the production calendar. These were agreed in advance, visible to the teams and designed around clear safety and operational boundaries.
During those windows, R&D and plant teams could test, adjust and learn without disturbing the whole production flow.
Operators knew what was happening and engineers knew the limits. So the plant was not becoming less disciplined. In fact, the discipline made experimentation safer and more useful…
And that is the point. Freedom and structure are not enemies. The challenge is to design the right structure so that freedom can produce learning not chaos.
Enabling ideas to flow
The system through which the idea must travel often matters more than the beauty of the idea itself. This is why I increasingly think about innovation as flow.
Not flow in a theoretical way but in a very practical sense:
- Can the idea move from customer insight to concept?
- Can it move from concept to validation?
- Can it move from validation to decision?
- Can it move from decision to execution?
- Can it move across functions without disappearing?
Case-study: Creating flow
I saw this clearly in a structured innovation journey we ran for a construction product line in a specific market. Instead of starting with an open-ended ideation session, we started with the opposite, the customer pain points. What were installers, specifiers and market teams really struggling with? What was slowing adoption? What was creating complexity? What could make the product more valuable or easier to use?
Before the workshop, teams gathered and clustered insights. During the workshop, they translated these into clearer problem statements and then into possible value propositions. We used storyboards, quick visuals and simple prototypes to make ideas more tangible.
But the most important part came afterwards.
Over the following weeks, teams tested the strongest concepts with customers and internal stakeholders. They came back with learning, not just with opinions: what customers valued, what constraints appeared, what would need to be adapted, and what could realistically move forward.
At the final decision point, the question was no longer: “Is this idea interesting?” but it became: “Has this idea earned the right to move into development?”
That shift is important. It protects creativity early on, and gradually introduces discipline as evidence grows.
This is what I mean by flow. Not a loose journey where everything moves forward, but a disciplined learning path where ideas are developed, adapted, challenged and either progressed or stopped for the right reasons.
What innovation leaders can do to manage the creativity paradox
The tensions described above cannot be eliminated. But they can be managed better. Progression does not mean everything survives. It means ideas move through learning before decisions are made. Some will make it to the end, and others, if not relevant, they will simply die.
Here are a few principles I have found useful in practice.
1. Separate exploration from execution
Early ideas should not be evaluated like mature projects. In the exploration stage, the objective is not to prove everything. It is to learn enough to decide whether the idea deserves more attention.
That means asking different questions:
• What problem are we solving?
• What assumption is most uncertain?
• What evidence do we need next?
• What would make us stop, pivot or continue?
A mature project needs a business case. An early idea needs a learning case first.
2. Adapt governance to maturity
At the beginning, governance should help teams learn quickly and safely. Later, as the idea becomes more concrete, governance should become more demanding: technical validation, customer evidence, operational feasibility, investment logic, risk assessment, etc.
The mistake is applying the same governance logic everywhere – timing is crucial.
Too much, too early, kills exploration, but if applied too late it creates execution risk.
3. Build bridges across functions
Shared ownership matters a lot here, as innovation often fails less because of the idea itself and more because of the handovers around it.
If R&D sees only technical risk, marketing sees only customer value, operations sees only complexity and finance sees only uncertainty… guess what happened?
Some of the best innovation work I have experienced happened when the right people were brought together early: product management, R&D, operations, certification, legal, sustainability, sales and sometimes customers or partners.
The intention is not to make the process heavier by including many voices too early, but to reduce late surprises created by not having input from the right experts early on.
4. Move from idea ownership to problem ownership
Many teams become attached to the first version of an idea, which then becomes something to defend. When that happens, feedback feels like criticism and governance meetings become approval battles.
A healthier approach is to shift from “my idea” to “our problem”.
If the problem is shared, the solution can evolve. People become less defensive, they are more willing to test, adapt, combine or even abandon the original idea if a better route appears.
This is not easy I know because ideas carry ego. But innovation becomes much stronger when teams care more about solving the problem than protecting the first answer.
5. Focus on progression, not only selection
Many innovation systems are designed around selection: Is this idea good enough? That question is important, but sometimes it comes too early.
A more useful question at the beginning is: What does this idea need in order to move forward?
Maybe it needs customer feedback, maybe a prototype, maybe a technical check, maybe a clearer owner, maybe a small experiment, and maybe it needs to be stopped because the evidence is weak.
Designing for tension, not eliminating it
It is tempting to think innovation would work better if we could remove friction. But I do not think that is realistic. In many cases, friction is not the enemy. It tells us where the real tensions are: between speed and safety, freedom and structure, creativity and discipline, ambition and feasibility.
From my own experience, innovation fails when organisations ask for creativity but do not design the conditions for it to survive. They ask people to think differently, but then, evaluate early ideas with the same tools used for mature execution. Or they ask teams to move fast, but without clarifying which risks must never be bypassed.
The challenge in my opinion is not to choose between creativity and discipline. Ideas need the right discipline at the right time and that is exactly where innovation management really begins.
About the contributor
Abdelmoula El Hadi is Group Head of Innovation at Knauf Insulation and author of The Creativity Paradox, exploring how organizations can unlock innovation without losing discipline and performance.
Website: https://www.abdelmoulaelhadi.com
