Innovate? How the hell do we do that!

Last time I painted a fairly bleak picture and promised hope this week. So today I'm pointing you towards Ben Bensaou: INSEAD professor, author, and as far as I can see the clearest thinker on how innovation ‘happens’.

In his framework, Built to Innovate, Bensaou argues that innovation isn't a rare spark of genius from a few 'creatives,' but a systematic process built on three essential pillars: Creation, Integration, and Reframing. He moves the needle from accidental discovery to a reliable organizational habit by involving every employee in identifying customer 'pain points' and 'non-consumption' areas.

By embedding these processes into the daily workflow, organizations can bridge the gap between high-level strategy and ground-level execution. This systematic approach ensures that new ideas are not just generated, but are filtered, integrated into the business model, and constantly refined to maintain a competitive edge in rapidly shifting markets.

A quick refresher. Last time, I made the case that a chasm is opening between agencies adapting to AI and those that aren't. Agency leaders are expert at executing strategy, managing clients, and protecting margin; but staying in the day-to-day performance zone is what leaves a business exposed when a transformation cycle hits, which is Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma. Left alone, an asset transfer looms from those who adapt to those who don't. My last blog was the diagnosis; this blog is what to do about it.

Built to Innovate, in brief

Bensaou set out the system in Built to Innovate, written with Karl Weber and named a Thinkers50 best new management book for 2022. Its premise is that innovation isn't an occasional breakthrough delegated to a special team; it's a continuous, organisation-wide activity, which he defines as systematically looking for, developing, and implementing new ideas that create value for the customer and the business. The vehicle is the innovating engine, a structure that runs in parallel with the execution engine every company already operates, and that draws on everyone rather than on R&D alone.

That engine runs on three processes Bensaou traced across more than twenty years of research and close to a hundred organisations, among them BASF, Starwood, Allianz, and Marvel Studios.

• Creation is the generating of ideas, led by the frontline people closest to the customer.

• Integration is the connecting of those ideas to the colleagues and resources that can build them, moving an idea to a decision faster than the hierarchy would; this is where middle managers earn their billing.

• Reframing is the senior leaders' task of challenging the assumptions that cap what the business believes it can do.

I was lucky enough to spend a day with Professor Bensaou, interviewing him for the Unicorny podcast.

The word is the problem

When Ben teaches executives, he's found that the word itself, innovation, causes anxiety. People assume the boss wants the next breakthrough product or a new market, and the pressure becomes too big to carry alongside the day job; so the useful behaviours freeze and nothing moves.

So, he stopped using that word and switched to innovating. Not innovation, but innovating, because the verb makes the thing feel achievable.

Now, some of you might be screaming semantic pedant at your screens. Others will recognise one of my favourite lines, from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where his fictional philologist Syme says: "The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect." To be honest, I've bastardised the quote for my own use, but it works. Orwell meant it as a warning, Newspeak narrowing thought by starving it of words, but I think it works in both directions. Language sets the frame for how we think; it doesn't just describe it. And, what's more, there's even a name for what Ben did. "Innovation" is what linguists call a nominalisation, a live verb embalmed into an abstract noun. It's the kind of word Helen Sword nicknamed a "zombie noun" because it drains the action out of a sentence. Switch back to "innovating" and you reanimate it. It's the same root, but a completely different expectation lands on the person being asked to do it.

Bensaou put it precisely: "Innovating does not imply any specific outcome or result. It's a verb. People associate it with an activity, an action, a process, a set of behaviours and attitudes that anyone can learn."

Picture innovation, the noun, as the tip of an iceberg; innovating is everything beneath the surface that makes the tip possible. Perhaps many agencies haven't crossed the chasm because they've chased the outcome without ever building the capability. They've wanted the tip without the iceberg.

Two engines, not one

So how do you build the capability? Every business, Bensaou argues, runs an execution engine: the bulk of the organisation, delivering today's strategy through set processes and KPIs. The organisations he studied had built a second engine alongside it, the innovating engine, "focused on building the strategy of tomorrow... where companies imagine, test, and prototype the products and processes of the future."

The important word is parallel; the engines don't take turns, they run at once. Someone might give ninety-five percent of their time to execution and five percent to the innovating engine; that five percent is built-in, protected, and regular, not left to enthusiasm.

This is where agencies tend to go wrong, in my opinion. The reflex answer to "we need to innovate" is a committee, a workshop, or a senior person handed an AI taskforce. Each is a one-off poke at the execution engine; none builds a second one.

Bensaou's Starwood example shows the alternative. Seven hundred frontline hotel managers were sent into Paris with metro tickets, notebooks, and cameras, and told to watch ordinary travellers. They came back with hundreds of ideas in a day, several of which seeded major initiatives. None were innovation specialists; they had permission, a simple brief, and a protected occasion.

The agency version

Take a twenty-five-person agency. The execution engine is delivery, account management, pitching, and billing, and it demands almost everything. The innovating engine, if it exists, is usually informal: a kitchen conversation, an idea raised at an all-hands and then quietly dropped. The informality is the problem, not the people. The frontline, in Bensaou's words, is "very eager to innovate and full of ideas. The only problem is that they don't feel their ideas are desired." In creative agencies the ideas are abundant, often, the mechanism to bring them to life isn't.

Building that mechanism takes three things: a regular, protected occasion to step out of execution and sit with the client in their world; a mechanism for ideas to be heard and connected; and explicit permission that this is legitimate and expected.

The forgotten heroes

A surprising finding from Bensaou's research concerned middle managers, whom he calls the "forgotten heroes of innovation." Without them, frontline ideas get lost. Their job is to make strategy operational, they feel no external pressure to innovate, and they're "squeezed in the middle"; yet they play the decisive connective role, giving people permission, backing ideas politically, and connecting them sideways to the resources that can develop them. He tells the story of a chance discovery at BASF that became P&G's Magic Eraser, kept alive only because a manager routed it straight to the right chemists instead of letting it climb the hierarchy and die in another silo.

Bensaou is describing conglomerates, so the layer he means barely exists in a fifty-person agency and not at all in a ten-person one, though the principle holds. Your idea-havers are the people closest to the work: account managers, designers, artworkers, strategists. The connector is whoever sits just above them with a foot still in the work, usually the account director or department head; close enough to the frontline to hear what's been noticed, senior enough to open doors, and credible enough with leadership to win an idea a hearing. In the smallest shops no one holds that seat, which is its own answer: the founder is the connector, whether they've realised it or not. Not an obvious innovation role, yet on Bensaou's evidence the most important one.

Innovating as habit, not crisis response

The last point is perhaps the most relevant to where the market sits. Bensaou was direct: "You don't need to wait for a crisis... You can innovate as a habit." The organisations that became powerhouses built the parallel engine in advance. They didn't start when the pressure arrived. By being proactive, the habit compounded, so they were already moving when disruption came.

The agencies handling AI well aren't, for the most part, doing it through a dramatic pivot. They’ve already looked at their work from the outside in, stayed close to client problems, and tested new approaches as routine; Moore's transformation zone was within reach because the innovating engine was already running.

For everyone else the question isn't whether to start, but whether to start while there's still time to build the habit before the pressure makes it urgent.

Bringing it to life

My job is a simple one. I exist to help agency owners achieve peak value. In this market that means building innovating into the core of your business. My network of expert advisers to help you achieve this is huge. I can tell you what you need to look like to achieve peak value, they will help you get there.