Your Innovation Manager Thinks Nobody Wants to Change. They're Probably Right.

Here's something nobody tells you when you step into a role where you're supposed to make innovation happen inside a big corporation: You're about to spend most of your time talking people out of the very thing that's keeping them safe.

Because safety—the comfortable routine of doing what you've always done—is seductive. It's predictable. Nobody gets fired for maintaining the status quo. And when some well-meaning innovation manager shows up with an idea that requires people to work differently, think differently, maybe even fail publicly, suddenly everyone finds very rational-sounding reasons why that specific idea won't work.

"The budget isn't there." "The timeline is too aggressive." "We've never done it that way before." My personal favorite: "That's not how we operate."

The real shit is this: They're not wrong. They're just answering the wrong question.

I recently spent time with Adrian Rubstein, an innovation manager at Merck Group who oversees innovation for an entire region of Latin America. His background is the kind that actually matters—he studied biology, then pharmacy, then epidemiology. He worked in pharma for five years before finally admitting that doing what he was supposed to do wasn't the same as doing what he actually loved. He wanted creativity with impact. Real impact.

But here's the uncomfortable truth Adrian discovered pretty quickly: Innovation isn't blocked by bad ideas. It's blocked by misalignment. And you can't fix misalignment with a better presentation deck.

The Disease That Kills Everything Before It Starts

When Adrian first tried to propose innovations at his company, he did what most people do. He had ideas. They were smart ideas. He showed the math. He showed examples where doing things differently cost less and delivered more. And it went nowhere.

He kept getting told his proposals were "the crazy ideas from Adrian." And the frustrating part? He couldn't figure out why. Until he realized he was solving the wrong problem.

Everyone assumes corporate innovation fails because of technical limitations or budget constraints or risk aversion. Sometimes those matter. But Adrian discovered that most ideas die because there's literally no agreement about what anyone is actually trying to achieve. You have a vision. Your stakeholder has a mission. Marketing has objectives. Finance has KPIs. And none of these things are talking to each other.

This is what kills 90% of corporate innovation before it even has a chance to fail properly.

Adrian started changing things by asking a single question at the beginning of every conversation: What's the purpose of what we're trying to do? Not the mission. Not the vision statement. The purpose—the umbrella that has to hold everything together.

Because here's what happens when you don't know the purpose: You can't align. And if you can't align, everyone's pulling in different directions. Your innovation becomes political. Your project becomes a turf war. And the best idea in the world dies because seven different departments are using it to achieve seven different things.

The Person You Need to Convince Doesn't Report to You

Every innovation manager is in the same position: You have almost no formal authority. You can't make anyone do anything. You can't force a business unit to adopt your idea. You can't override a regional manager's decision. All you have is the ability to influence.

Most innovation frameworks ignore this completely. They act like if you just have the right idea, people will fall in line. That's not how human beings work.

Adrian's approach is almost deceptively simple, but it works because it starts from respect instead of conviction. When he wants to move something forward, he doesn't lead with the technology. He leads with understanding the person.

He talks to stakeholders—I mean really talks to them. Not the ten-minute stakeholder interview where you're checking boxes. Deep conversations about their world. What are they under pressure to accomplish? What keeps them up at night? What success looks like to them specifically? Because what matters to a facilities manager is completely different from what matters to a clinical director. You have to know which buttons matter to which people.

And then—this is the critical part—he shows them how your solution solves their specific problem in their specific context. Not a generic pitch. Not a PowerPoint with fifty slides that nobody's reading anyway. A conversation about their world and how you can help them win in it.

Adrian even took this to another level by using video to communicate complex ideas. Instead of presenting fifty PowerPoint slides to executives who are checking their phones and answering emails, he creates one-minute videos that show what a project will actually do. A compelling story with a good soundtrack that gets attention in ninety seconds. That's harder than slides. But it fucking works because it respects people's attention.

The fundamental insight here is simple but most people miss it: You don't influence people by being right. You influence people by understanding what they actually need and showing them how you can help them get it.

How to Actually Solve the Problem You Think You're Solving

Adrian uses a structured approach to innovation work that sounds simple but requires real discipline to execute. It starts with discovery.

Most companies skip discovery entirely. They see a problem and jump immediately to solutions. Adrian does the opposite. He runs the Five Whys—asking "why" repeatedly until you get past the symptom to the actual root cause. Because the problem people tell you is almost never the real problem. A manager says they need better sensors in their facility. But when you dig deeper, they actually need to reduce costs. When you dig deeper still, they need to prove their ROI to corporate. When you dig even deeper, they're under pressure because a competing department is getting more budget. The real problem wasn't sensors. It was organizational politics and resource allocation.

Once discovery is done, Adrian maps the customer journey. Where exactly in that journey is the pain point? Because you can't solve a problem in isolation from context. If a doctor can't diagnose a patient, is it because they lack diagnostic tools, or because patients can't access the hospital? Is it the availability of medicine, or is it education about how to use it? Different roots require completely different solutions. And if you fix the wrong root, you've just wasted everyone's time.

Only then does he brainstorm. And when he brainstorms, he goes actually crazy. He generates fifty ideas. A hundred ideas. Because most teams stop at the first solution, which is usually just a variation on what they already do. You have to go weird before you can go right. You have to get past the obvious before you find the real opportunity.

Then he filters down to what's actually feasible—what matches the budget, timeline, and capabilities the organization has. And then comes the golden circle: Why are we doing this? What are we trying to achieve? How will we actually do it? Most innovation work gets this backwards. You have to start with why or everything else breaks.

Finally, he builds a prototype and tests it with actual people who would use it. Not a focus group. An interview. Open-ended questions. A conversation. Because people can't articulate what they want until they see what's possible. And even then, they'll tell you what you want to hear unless you're asking the right questions.

Why Most Innovation Frameworks Are Designed by People Who've Never Actually Innovated

Here's what Adrian keeps bumping into: Most corporate innovation frameworks are designed by people who have never actually had to innovate inside a political organization.

They were designed by consultants who show up for three days, run a workshop, and leave with a check. By academics who study innovation in controlled environments. By startup people who never had to deal with twenty different stakeholders who all have veto power over your ideas.

The real work of innovation inside a big company isn't about having more ideas. It's about navigating complexity. It's about understanding incentives. It's about knowing that the person in facilities management doesn't actually care about innovation—they care about staying employed and keeping their boss happy. The director of marketing doesn't want to fail publicly, so she'll smile at your idea and then do nothing with it. The CFO doesn't want risk, so every proposal needs to show ROI on things that are literally impossible to predict.

You can't innovate your way around human nature. You have to work with it.

Adrian measures his success not by the number of innovations launched or products shipped. He measures it by the number of problems solved and the number of prototypes tested. His KPIs are: How many interviews did we conduct with actual stakeholders? How many prototypes did we actually build and test? How satisfied are the people we worked with? Did they feel like we actually helped them think differently?

This is almost backwards from how most companies think about innovation. They want launch rates. Product numbers. Market impact. Adrian is measuring something much harder: Did we actually change how this organization thinks about problems? And did we actually help them solve the thing they needed solved?

Why This Matters Even If You're Not a Corporate Innovation Manager

You're probably not running an innovation program at a pharmaceutical company. Most people won't. But the principles Adrian uses every single day are universal.

You can't influence people through force or authority. You have to do it through understanding. You can't solve complex problems by jumping straight to solutions. You have to spend time actually understanding the problem first—the real problem, not the symptom. You can't expect people to change behavior without showing them how that change serves their interests better than the status quo. And you can't measure what matters by counting outputs. You have to measure outcomes.

These aren't innovation principles. They're human principles. They apply whether you're trying to move a new product through a healthcare company or convince your team to change how you operate or convince your family to try something different.

The Thing Nobody Admits

Adrian said something towards the end of our conversation that stuck with me: "People are the obstacle to innovation. It's not technology. It's people."

But I'd push back on that slightly. People aren't the obstacle. Misalignment is the obstacle. People who understand what they're working toward, who feel heard in the process, who can see how change benefits them—those people will move mountains. They'll work nights. They'll push back against their own departments. They'll champion your idea because it's not your idea anymore. It's their idea too.

People who feel confused, excluded, or like they're being sold something they didn't ask for—those people will kill your innovation, every single time. And they won't even feel bad about it. They'll feel justified.

The job of an innovation manager isn't to overcome people. It's to align people around something that matters. And that's infinitely harder than having a good idea. But it's also the only thing that actually works.

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Want the Full Story?

If you want to hear Adrian's complete framework for how he approaches innovation at a major pharmaceutical company—including how he uses small videos to actually get executive attention and the exact process he uses to turn stakeholder resistance into stakeholder momentum—listen to his full conversation on The School of Innovation podcast.

Yaniv Corem's interview with Adrian Rubstein gets into the day-to-day reality of what actually happens when you try to make innovation work inside a complex organization. It's forty minutes of someone being radically honest about what works and what doesn't. And more importantly, why it works.

Because here's the thing about being an innovation manager in a big corporation: You're not trying to have better ideas than everyone else. You're trying to make it possible for an entire organization to think differently about their problems. And that's a job that requires patience, clarity, genuine respect for the people you're trying to move, and the ability to ask good questions instead of providing good answers.

Most people fail at it because they try to change people's behavior without changing their understanding first. Adrian succeeds because he does it the other way around.