Successful innovation? Sometimes you have to let the business case go

Real innovation comes from thinking completely outside the box. From letting go of what you know and moving towards what could be.

Three lenses on innovation

There is plenty of theory about how to look at innovation. I use three lenses myself.

Lens 1: optimise
How can we do what we already do, but smarter?

Lens 2: adapt
How can we adjust our business to emerging opportunities?

Lens 3: reinvent
How do we reinvent ourselves if our customer's world changes completely?

Let me illustrate that with an example. Say you supply recruitment software. What does innovation look like through each lens?

Through lens 1 you add AI features to your existing Applicant Tracking System. CVs are screened automatically, candidates are matched faster, emails are generated. The recruiter works more efficiently, but essentially does the same job.

Through lens 2 you could respond to the demand for data-driven recruitment. You build in predictive analytics that help clients judge who the right candidate is.

Innovating through lens 3? Then you ask a far more radical question. For example: what if AI takes over 80% of recruitment work? At that point your client no longer needs expensive software to support recruiters. So you have to come up with something entirely new. Not smarter or faster, but fundamentally different.

The space that opens up when you let go of the calculation

For lens 1 and lens 2, the business case is an excellent instrument. You look at a process that runs inefficiently or something missing from your current product or service. Then you calculate what it costs to solve and what it delivers. Valuable, and you should keep doing it.

But sometimes you need to do something that has never been done before. You cannot fully calculate that. For this you need something else.

Intuition.

Intuition is not magic

Following your intuition. To many people that sounds rather vague.

I see it differently. Intuition is the result of two things.

1. You know very well what you want in the future.
2. You have a radar pointed outwards, scanning for information that helps you reach that goal.

At Blis Digital that radar (partly powered by AI agents) is tuned to things like:

• Technological development: what is coming and what can we do with it?
• Key competitors: what do they publish about their roadmaps?
• Crossovers between industries: how could something that works in one sector work in ours?

Intuition is nothing magical. It is the result of paying attention and knowing what you want.

All those (sometimes subtle) pieces of information you collect eventually add up to a feeling: this is what we should do.

Finding the right balance

Of course you cannot run a company entirely on intuition. I am in favour of finding the right balance.

At Blis Digital, a large share of our attention, money and energy goes to projects with a solid business case behind them.

But with a smaller share we deliberately take risks.

That has also become easier than ever: thanks to the technology available to us today, the cost of experimenting has dropped significantly.

Sometimes you simply have to dare to jump in at the deep end.

But daring to jump is not the same as swimming on forever. In lens 3 this is the most important skill: knowing as early as possible when to stop. Carry on too long with an experiment that delivers nothing and you mostly end up doing the wrong things.

Bring the outside world in (and let us help)

If you really want to innovate, you need to do two things. Look inside your company and explore which problems you can solve with new technology. And let yourself be inspired by what comes from outside, so you spot solutions to problems that do not exist yet.

Most organisations have the first movement well under control. The second one often not yet.

You do not have to build that outward radar alone. That is the role we like to play: bringing the outside world into your world. So you see opportunities that are still out of sight.

We are happy to drop by for a brainstorming session, for example, or to deliver AI agents that continuously scan the outside world for opportunities.

Curious what that looks like for your organisation? Let's talk.