Journal / Strategy
Innovation is a marathon
Temporal innovation initiatives or programs are great for PR or to recruit people, but they hardly lead to the ROI initially set out. Real, sustainable innovation requires structural commitment and long-term dedication — not a sprint.
The trap of the innovation programme
Many organisations launch innovation labs, hackathons, or dedicated innovation teams with genuine enthusiasm. These initiatives generate energy, good press, and sometimes genuinely interesting ideas. But they rarely produce the compounding returns that organisations are hoping for.
Why? Because innovation is a capability that has to be built over time, embedded into how an organisation works — not a project with a start and end date.
What long-term commitment looks like
The organisations that consistently produce meaningful innovation share a few structural characteristics:
- Dedicated time and resources — not borrowed from existing teams under delivery pressure
- Psychological safety — teams must be able to experiment and fail without career risk
- Leadership continuity — innovation strategies require years to bear fruit; leadership churn kills them
- Connected to the core business — innovation that's too far from the company's strengths rarely gets adopted
The marathon mindset
Andreas Sjöström, writing in Fast Company, outlines four strategies for maintaining innovation momentum over time. The common thread across all of them is patience — a willingness to invest in capabilities that will compound slowly but decisively.
Innovation is not a 100-metre dash. It's a marathon. The organisations that win are the ones that stay in the race long enough for their investments to mature.
Reference: "Four Ways to Make Innovation Last" by Andreas Sjöström, Fast Company.
