Ideas Don't Die From Lack of Genius. They Die From Lack of Plumbing.

Your best idea is dying right now. Not because it's bad. Not because the market doesn't want it. It's dying because your organization has no idea how to move it from "Hey, I had a thought" to "We're actually doing this."

I recently talked with Jesse Nieminen, founder of Viima, who's spent years watching this exact phenomenon play out in thousands of companies. And here's what he found: Organizations are drowning in ideas. Their problem isn't a creative crisis. It's a plumbing crisis.

Think about your last brainstorm. Exciting energy, whiteboards full of possibilities, that momentary feeling like anything is possible. Then what happened? An email three weeks later: "Thanks for all the submissions. We're evaluating them." Then silence. The idea enters what Jesse calls "the black hole"—a mysterious space where promising initiatives go to quietly die.

Meanwhile, everyone feels vaguely annoyed. The innovators feel unheard. The executives wonder why they're not seeing results despite all their talk about wanting more innovation. And the organization keeps spending money on training and consultants and innovation labs, all while the actual bottleneck sits five feet away in a spreadsheet nobody organized.

The System Is The Problem, Not The People

Here's what most companies get wrong: They think they have an innovation problem when they actually have a process problem.

Jesse's data (collected directly from thousands of innovation managers using his platform) points to two consistent barriers, and neither of them is "not enough good ideas." The barriers are:

First: Leadership reluctance and misaligned decision-making. Executives claim to want bold innovation but have built decision-making processes designed for factory construction, not experimentation. Everything requires committee approval, detailed ROI projections, and alignment with quarterly targets. When you try to apply industrial-era decision-making to exponential-era problems, ideas suffocate.

Second: No shared language around what innovation even means. In the same organization, one person thinks innovation means incremental improvement, another thinks it means disruption, and the executive team thinks it means "whatever keeps us relevant." Everyone's working from a different definition playing a different game.

The math here is straightforward: If you don't have clarity on what you're trying to accomplish, and you don't have a process to move ideas forward, then ideas won't move forward. It has nothing to do with creativity.

The Hidden Power of Intentional Friction

I ask Jesse a question that most companies never actually address: If you're going to build an innovation process, what does the decision-making actually look like? Do you budget for it first or run pilots first?

His answer surprised me because it wasn't an either/or. It was "It depends on your context, but either way, be intentional about it."

Most companies stumble into innovation processes backward. They wait until an idea surfaces, then scramble to figure out if they have budget. This is like buying a house and then checking your bank account.

The smart move is different. Before you start asking people to generate ideas, know the answer to: What are we actually willing to implement? What problems are we trying to solve? How much complexity can we handle right now?

If the answers are fuzzy, don't start an innovation process. Nothing is more demoralizing than generating ideas in a system that's not ready to move on them. You're training people that innovation is theater.

But here's the uncomfortable part: Building this clarity requires honesty. You have to admit what you actually care about, not what you wish you cared about. You have to acknowledge your constraints, your appetite for failure, and your real risk tolerance.

Most companies aren't willing to do this. They want the energy of innovation without the honesty. So they run hackathons and brainstorms that generate temporary excitement and long-term cynicism.

The Topology of Innovation Failure

Jesse describes something that stuck with me: The organizations failing at innovation aren't failing at the creative part. They're failing at the structural part.

Specifically, they've confused a single innovation process with multiple innovation contexts. They put one person or one small team in charge of "innovation" and wonder why nothing happens.

But that's not how organizations actually work. The customer service team innovates differently than the product team. Supply chain improvements happen through a different lens than business model experiments. Trying to run all of these through one gatekeeper is like trying to route all internet traffic through one server.

The companies that actually work are the ones that distribute ownership. They identify who in the organization has the authority to implement ideas in their area (an operations manager, a business unit head, a product director), and they build processes so those people can move forward without waiting for central approval.

One global pharmaceutical company, for example, had different innovation processes for each division: R&D followed one path (longer timelines, higher stakes), supply chain followed another (faster cycles, operational focus), and commercial followed a third (customer-focused, rapid testing). Same company, three different approaches, all working because they were designed for their actual context.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Bureaucracy

Jesse's data reveals something most innovation leaders don't want to admit: Bureaucracy isn't the enemy. Unintentional bureaucracy is.

The problem isn't that decisions take a long time. The problem is that people don't know why they take a long time, or what the decision criteria are, or what happens next.

If you have a clear process—"Ideas come in here, we evaluate them on these criteria, and you'll hear back by this date"—people can work with that. They understand the game.

But if the process is vague and arbitrary, if different ideas seem to get different treatment for unclear reasons, if some people's ideas move forward and others don't and nobody knows why—that's when cynicism sets in. That's when talented people stop submitting ideas because they've done the math and figured out that it's not worth their time.

The worst innovation process is better than no innovation process, because at least people know the rules.

What You Can Actually Do

You're probably not going to rearchitect your entire innovation infrastructure this week. So here's what matters:

First, define what innovation means for your organization. Not for the consultants or the board or the industry. For you. Specify it. Write it down. Get people to actually agree on it. This alone will fix 40% of your problems.

Second, design a process that matches your context. If you're a manufacturing company with a long product development cycle, your innovation process looks nothing like a software company's. Pretending it does is fantasy.

Third, identify who owns ideas in their domain. Don't create a central innovation function that everything flows through. Create distributed innovation ownership, and give those people tools to move things forward.

Fourth, be ruthlessly honest about what you'll actually implement. If you don't have budget, say so. If you're not willing to kill existing programs to make room for new ones, say so. If your appetite for failure is zero, say so. Then build an innovation process that matches your actual risk tolerance, not your aspirational one.

And fifth, measure the wrong things. Stop counting ideas. Stop measuring "innovation as a percentage of revenue." Those metrics are theater. Measure whether ideas are moving. Measure how long things take. Measure how many ideas made it from proposal to pilot. These are the metrics that matter.

Why This Actually Matters

You're sitting on brilliant ideas right now. People in your organization have thought of better ways to do things. They've imagined new offerings. They've seen where the market is moving and what your customers actually need.

Those ideas are dying in your process. Not because people aren't creative enough. Because you haven't built the plumbing to move them forward.

The organizations that win the next decade aren't the ones with smarter people. They're the ones with better systems for moving ideas from imagination to execution.

And here's the part that should keep you up at night: Building that system doesn't require brilliance. It requires intentionality. It requires honesty. And it requires doing something that makes most organizations deeply uncomfortable.

It requires admitting what they actually care about.

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Want the Full Story?

If you want to dig deeper into how to build an innovation process that actually works—how to define your innovation strategy, how to budget for experimentation, and how to avoid the common pitfalls that kill good ideas—listen to Yaniv Corem's full conversation with Jesse Nieminen on The School of Innovation podcast.

It's one of those conversations where you'll hear directly from someone who's built tools for thousands of organizations, and who's spent years understanding exactly why most innovation initiatives fail.

Because here's the truth about innovation: Your next great idea isn't falling through cracks. It's drowning in bureaucracy. The question is: Are you willing to fix the plumbing?