Why good ideas die and how to save them

This week I was running a three day workshop with a group of leaders from an education foundation on the topic of connecting strategy through to execution. We got on to the topic of innovation and began discussing Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The talented group of engineers, computer programmers and scientists that came together at PARC to invent the future of computing did an amazing job, originating a wide range of innovations including laser printing, the graphical user interface (GUI) and the desktop paradigm, the computer mouse and even Ethernet. And yet it was a young Steve Jobs that famously visited PARC in 1979 and was so impressed with the GUI and mouse that he incorporated them both into the first Apple Macintosh in 1984. It was not Xerox that benefitted from these early PARC innovations but companies like Apple, IBM and Microsoft.

PARC had proven themselves to be more than adept at invention, yet the wider organisation of Xerox proved to be less than adept at executing these ideas. There are likely multiple reasons why this happened but it’s an example of a fundamental truth about innovation – having brilliant ideas is only the start.

The three-act drama of innovation

One of my favourite ways of thinking about innovation comes from the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. He defined technological change as a three-stage process: invention (the birth of ideas), innovation (commercialising those ideas), and diffusion (scaling them to market dominance). Each stage demands different skills, resources, and mindsets but in order to be great at innovation, a business needs to be fluent in all three and to be able to orchestrate the flow from idea to scaled adoption.

When I was writing my first book I married this idea with Simon Wardley’s concept of pioneers, settlers, and town planners as a way of describing the unique sensibilities that are needed at each stage of the innovation process.

• Pioneers are the inventors, brilliant at exploring uncharted territory and generating entirely new concepts. As Simon says, ‘they show you wonder but they fail a lot.’ Their brilliance lies in an enthusiasm to forge a new path, apply lateral thinking and be willing to be misunderstood.
• Settlers make sense of those abstract ideas and turn them into something useful. They too are brilliant people because they transform wild ideas into practical application, building commercial models, and also trust and understanding with the first users.
• Town planners then operationalise these proven concepts. They are also brilliant people since they can find the way to make early propositions workable at scale so that they can deliver true impact.

The tragedy of Xerox PARC wasn’t a lack of pioneers. They had assembled what many considered the greatest concentration of computer science talent ever gathered in one place. It was the absence of settlers and town planners who could transform those pioneering inventions into market-ready innovations and scalable businesses.

The execution gap

The fact that PARC was set up in California, 3,000 miles from Xerox’s headquarters in Rochester New York likely played no small part in this failure to execute. It was, perhaps, a geographic distance that became a metaphor for a deeper disconnect. Innovators at PARC referred to executives at headquarters as ‘toner heads’, due to their inability to see beyond their core product and service area. While PARC engineers envisioned computers communicating across vast networks, corporate leadership remained fixated on photocopiers.

This disconnect, and the failure of vision, led to the inability to commercialise and scale ground breaking innovations. As an example, the mouse that the PARC engineers designed cost $300 to build and would only work for two weeks of use. Apple’s version cost less than $15 and was built for mass production.

Building an innovation supply chain

In the modern era the same challenges still exist but the stakes have only grown higher. In an era demanding continuous innovation, companies need a perpetual cycle of exploration, execution, and exploitation.

• Exploration (pioneers) is the search for underserved customer needs, new problems to solve, and value from emerging technologies. This has to be embedded and continuous, not episodic, but exploration without execution is just expensive R&D tourism.
• Execution (settlers) bridges the treacherous gap between early-stage ideas and scalable solutions. This is where prototypes are turned into products, and early commercial models indicate scalability and market traction. Without systematic execution you get brilliant inventions that never leave the lab.
• Extension and exploitation (town planners) maximise the potential of proven innovations through efficiency, optimisation, and scale. They transform successful experiments into sustainable competitive advantages.

Going beyond the innovation lab means developing a systematic way of taking early stage ideas and commercialising them at scale. Ideas don’t just die suddenly, they slowly wither in the desert between invention and implementation. Handing a fragile, early stage proposition off to an operational team who are not emotionally invested in its origins or the work that it will take to make it a success often results in innovation atrophy. I think there’s several ways in which businesses can navigate this execution gap:

• The ‘innovation midwife model’: Create dedicated ‘translation teams’ who specialise in the dangerous middle ground between invention and implementation. They embed with pioneers during late-stage development, then shepherd the innovation through its vulnerable early commercialisation, gradually transferring ownership rather than throwing it over the wall. They are the ‘midwives’ of innovation – present for both the birth and those critical first months of life.
• The ‘founder-in-residence’ program: When innovations show promise, the pioneering inventor becomes a temporary ‘founder’ within the operational team for 6-12 months. They evangelise, troubleshoot, and keep the idea alive while settlers build commercial infrastructure around it.
• Progressive commitment gates: Replace binary handoffs with overlapping phases. Pioneers start with total ownership while settlers observe. As the proposition matures settlers take greater control.
• Innovation embassies: Establish permanent ‘embassies’ with settlers residing in pioneer territory and vice versa. These are residents who become cultural bridges. The settler in the lab thinks commercialisation from day one, the pioneer in operations keeps innovation alive during scaling.
• Revenue-sharing threads: Give pioneers small, long-term stakes in their innovations’ commercial success – enough to maintain emotional investment. When pioneers benefit from successful scaling, they become natural advocates during treacherous transitions.
• The studio model: Borrow from Hollywood and have mixed pioneer-settler teams work together from conception through early commercialisation in a ‘studio’. Once mature, the entire studio gets acquired by an operational division, keeping the team intact through vulnerable transitions.
• The graduation portfolio: Treat transitions like a venture portfolio, expecting a proportion of failures, planning accordingly, and learning systematically. Create a ‘graduation fund’, resourcing innovations during vulnerable transitions, before they’re mature enough for operational budgets, thereby removing the immediate ROI pressure that kills promising ideas.

None of these are likely to be easy, but without a systemic connection between pioneers and settlers, even revolutionary ideas become expensive fossils – perfectly preserved examples of what could have been.

I have one final thought on this. Years ago when I worked in media for a big magazine publisher I came up with an idea for a new homes and interiors magazine for young dinky’s (dual-income-no-kids-yet). My future wife and I had just bought our first flat and were precisely in the target market and I really thought that there was nothing out there that served this newly prosperous demographic. I presented the idea to publishers and anyone else that would listen to me (after one presentation to a publisher I was described as a ‘clever boy’ – how patronising is that?). But it wasn’t until a well thought-of senior editorial figure proposed a very similar idea that it was taken at all seriously. That magazine (unlike many homes magazines which have fallen by the wayside) is still in circulation today, but this story is a classic example of what we might call the innovation ‘credibility tax’ – the same idea carries different weight depending on who’s holding it. It’s like a kind of invisible innovation caste system where ideas are valued not by their merit but by the altitude from which they fall.

A version of this post appeared on my weekly Substack of AI and digital trends, and transformation insights. To join our community of over ten thousand subscribers you can sign up to that here.

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