“I don’t like to fail,” the 300-pound Razorback linebacker muttered under his breath.
Always the attentive student, KeShawn sat in the front of the class and usually said little. I could tell he was agitated by my lecture. In my Creativity and Innovation class, we had just reviewed a litany of founders who repeatedly failed before eventually striking gold, ending with Colonel Sanders, who found fame well into his fifties.
“Point taken.”
What seemed to bother him was the assumption that people should set out to fail, when really, they should set out to win. Yet failure is inevitable, and the “fail fast” culture embraced by many tech professionals has made screwing up acceptable, provided you learn something and move on.
KeShawn was having none of it.
I could tell by the look in his eye that he was definitely not picking up what I was putting down. That stuck with me. He was right: failing sucks.
That got me thinking. What does it actually mean for organizations to innovate successfully? Failure will happen, but to KeShawn’s point, failure is not the goal. Success is.
So what are the ingredients for successful innovation?
Inspiration from Baking
I’ve been a lifelong foodie and amateur chef. Cooking usually pleases others and delivers immediate gratification. Recently, however, I’ve taken up baking with whole grains, which can be even more challenging. If you’re unfamiliar, cooks and bakers are very different breeds.
Cooks tend to improvise and play fast and loose with recipes and ingredients. Bakers, on the other hand, are exacting and scientific. They use scales, carefully measure ingredients, and generally follow the rules.
Entering the world of baking has been a humbling exercise, especially while working with wheat berries, rye, and temperamental sourdough starters. Charitably, I’d say I’m operating at about a 40 percent success rate, but I keep improving.
No baker sets out to fail, yet failure finds them regularly. The same is true for entrepreneurs and CX change agents. The trick is to iterate quickly, learn from mistakes, and prevent any single failure from becoming catastrophic.
While removing friction is an admirable way to improve customer experience, organizations that create memorable experiences do more than make things easier. They create experiences people genuinely enjoy. So how do they do that? Let’s go to the kitchen and find out.
The Recipe
In baking, recipes are critical. Exact measurements and temperatures can make or break the final product. Yet even the most detailed recipes leave room for uncertainty. I’ve seen recipes measured down to the gram that casually instruct you to “let ferment until firm but not fluffy and over proofed (2 to 6 hours).”
Seriously?
The point is that baking requires judgment. Experienced bakers develop a feel for how the dough should look, smell, and respond. That intuition comes through practice and familiarity with the ingredients and process.
Innovation works the same way. Great innovation starts with an intimate understanding of the problem being solved. Sometimes innovation comes from insiders looking to build a better mousetrap, but often it comes from outsiders with fresh perspectives. Leo Fender, for example, was not a musician, yet he created the Fender Stratocaster.
A fresh perspective combined with deep empathy for customer needs often leads to better solutions. Early ideas may be rough or incomplete, but refinement comes with time.
The Ingredients
I once watched a cooking competition where teams made identical pizzas using the exact same recipe and ingredients, except for one variable: the water. One team used water from New York, another from Chicago, and another from Los Angeles.
A panel of ordinary pizza lovers judged the results. The verdict was unanimous.
People matter.
An organization’s people are its ingredients. Without the right people, innovation has little chance of succeeding. Unfortunately, large organizations are often structured in ways that discourage innovation. They emphasize control, incremental change, and the mindset of “don’t fix what isn’t broken.”
Innovation rarely emerges from committees. It comes from restless people dissatisfied with existing solutions and determined to build something better. Researchers Wu, Wang, and Evans (2019) found that small teams are more likely to produce disruptive innovations, while large teams tend to develop existing ideas.
In my experience, these innovations are usually born from personal irritation. PhotoniCare emerged because its founder’s child suffered from recurring ear infections. Drew Houston created Dropbox because he was frustrated with syncing files while traveling. James Dyson became obsessed with fixing underperforming vacuums. Linda Lindahl and Polly Smith helped create the sports bra industry because suitable athletic undergarments for women did not exist.
If your company wants to become more innovative, do not start with a committee. Start with people who are dissatisfied with the status quo and motivated to improve it. Those people are usually annoying anyway. Give them something useful to do.
Trial and Error
Cooking may tolerate improvisation, but baking does not. Precision matters. Yet even in baking, instructions are often surprisingly vague: “Let rise for 2 to 8 hours” or “Refrigerate overnight if necessary.”
Baking is precise, but also inexact.
Whole grains make things even more unpredictable because they behave differently than processed flour. Success requires experimentation, adjustment, and repetition. Innovation is no different.
The human species did not appear overnight, nor did the iPhone 17. Both evolved over time, adapting to their environment through countless iterations and dead ends.
You may begin with a promising idea, but it will take repeated attempts before it becomes a viable product. Edison tested thousands of filaments before developing a practical light bulb.
Iteration is not failure. It is refinement.
Consumer feedback eventually becomes essential. Many terrible user experiences exist because designers assumed they knew better than their customers. I once baked bread I thought tasted fantastic. My family quickly corrected that assumption and sent me back to the kitchen.
That was not failure. That was learning.
This is also where founder arrogance can emerge. Too often, consumer testing becomes a sales pitch instead of a genuine attempt to gather feedback. There is a time to pitch, but customer research is not it.
Give Them Time to Rise
Bread needs time to rise. Innovation does too.
Yet large organizations often demand accountability, rapid results, and immediate wins. Innovation rarely works that way. It usually requires patience, experimentation, and long-term commitment.
That is why true intrapreneurs are relatively rare and tend to flourish only in organizations that intentionally support innovation, such as 3M, Apple, and Google.
Large organizations are typically very good at refining existing products and services but far less effective at disruptive innovation. In Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning (1991), James March described this tendency as exploitation, or the refinement and extension of existing competencies and technologies. As a result, many large companies acquire smaller firms that are better at experimentation. According to the Small Business Administration, small businesses produce 16 times more patents per employee than large corporations.
The smartest organizations understand this. They provide innovative teams with resources, protection, and time, and then they get out of the way.
The biggest mistake I’ve seen is connecting skunkworks organizations too closely to the mothership.
At a previous firm, I oversaw software development efforts that constantly stalled because our resources were repeatedly redirected to solve urgent problems tied to bespoke programs. Those projects paid the bills, but they also prevented meaningful innovation from moving forward.
One Chef
The old saying that too many chefs ruin the meal is especially true in innovation.
Innovation teams should be small, well-funded, and independent.
When I was developing software, I had dedicated sales, marketing, and product management support, but the software engineers reported elsewhere. That meant their priorities could change instantly depending on what their actual manager wanted. Since I was not conducting their performance reviews, my priorities always came second to the CIO’s.
Ultimately, our efforts stalled and (surprise surprise) we acquired a smaller organization to move faster.
As O’Reilly and Tushman (2004) noted in The Ambidextrous Organization, successful firms “allow considerable autonomy to the separate organizations” responsible for exploratory innovation. Large companies often fail not because they lack talent or capital, but because they smother innovative teams with the same structures designed for operational efficiency.
If your organization is serious about innovation, the team must ultimately answer to one head chef. Otherwise, the kitchen becomes chaos.
Oil and Water
Obviously, some things do not mix well. One of those things is often organizational culture.
One of the most underestimated factors in corporate acquisitions is culture. To some M&A finance types, this may sound like soft psychobabble, but cultural integration problems are consistently cited among the most common reasons mergers fail. There is a substantial body of academic research supporting this view, along with my own experience.
As I mentioned, at Maritz Research we gave up building software ourselves and instead acquired a software company to do it. That company was Allegiance, a software startup based in Utah. In 2013, they were much smaller than we were, but they had impressive technology. They also had a ping pong table in the office, which everyone agreed was a marker of software greatness.
At Maritz Research, we were a giant in bespoke customer experience tracking for many of the world’s largest companies. It was a conservative culture built on the philosophy of measuring five times and cutting once. That fit well with our conservative clients.
Although we tried hard to make it work, the two cultures were fundamentally opposed. At Maritz Research, if a customer wanted something, we built it and delivered the highest level of service possible. As a services company, we moved slowly, and because every platform was unique and essentially a minimum viable product, errors were common during launch. If we made it through that pain, and we usually did, those custom platforms could support extraordinarily complex programs and were difficult to replicate.
Allegiance operated very differently; they delivered programs at a fraction of the cost. It was taboo to promise software changes for an individual client. The engineers ran the show, and the focus was on standardization and reducing labor. They moved quickly and iterated improvements into the platform over time. Instead of maintaining 20 custom platforms, they had one.
Even the measures of success were different. As an established research company, Maritz Research focused on contribution margin and client retention. Allegiance, as a software company, focused on recurring revenue and customer acquisition.
The result was constant tension. The service side pushed for customization while the software side pushed for standardization. Neither approach was wrong, but each was optimized for a different business model.
The two cultures never fit together well, and over time most of the service-oriented legacy team either left or was displaced. After years of attempting to merge the companies successfully, the business was eventually sold, became InMoment, and later acquired Press Ganey, which was subsequently acquired by archrival Qualtrics.
The lesson is that acquisitions should often be left alone to innovate. We should have acquired Allegiance, given them a boatload of money, and stayed out of their way. At the same time, Maritz Research should have continued doing what it did best on the services side.
While software ultimately won the day, forcing the two cultures together destroyed some of the unique value each side brought to the client. Had the businesses remained independent while benefiting from shared ownership, the outcome might have been very different. InMoment may well have been the acquirer rather than the acquired.
Making Great Bread
KeShawn was right. Nobody should set out to fail.
If there is a recipe for innovation, it is surprisingly simple: start with the right people, find an important problem to solve, allow them to experiment, and give them enough time to succeed. Most organizations struggle with innovation not because they lack talent, but because they fail to create the conditions innovation requires. Too often, innovative teams are buried in committees, constrained by processes designed for operational efficiency, or forced into cultures that value predictability over discovery.
The organizations that innovate successfully are not the ones that celebrate failure for its own sake. They are the ones that create environments where experimentation, iteration, and learning can occur without catastrophe. They understand that innovation requires a different recipe than optimization.
Great innovators are chasing solutions, and failure is simply part of the journey. Like baking, innovation requires the right ingredients, patience, repetition, and enough autonomy for creativity to rise. Most importantly, it requires leaders willing to tolerate uncertainty long enough for something worthwhile to emerge from the oven.
Because in the end, nobody remembers the failed loaves.
They remember the great bread.