Your Company Doesn't Need an Innovation Lab. It Needs a Backbone.
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Most companies don’t have an innovation problem.
They have an execution problem.
An innovation lab looks good on a slide. It creates activity. It keeps people busy.
But it rarely changes how your company actually works.
The real gap sits somewhere else: you don’t have a backbone that lets ideas move from “interesting” to “running in the real world”.
Here’s what I see again and again.
1. Ideas live in isolation
Labs generate concepts that never touch operations.
Teams can’t adopt them because nothing connects to existing systems, data or workflows.
So you get a pile of prototypes. No impact. No behaviour change.
2. Strategy and delivery don’t talk
You plan in one corner.
You build in another.
Nobody owns the flow between the two.
Good ideas die in the void between “we should” and “we built”.
3. No system to support continuous progress
Teams reinvent the wheel every time.
New tools, new processes, another canvas.
No shared way to move an idea from start to real usage.
So speed stays low and quality stays inconsistent.
So what does work? A backbone.
A simple, repeatable system that ties everything together:
Systems that do — the operational side. Clear routing, ownership, data, infrastructure.
Systems that think — structured ways to look at the problem, test assumptions, reduce the guesswork.
Systems that learn — feedback loops, usage data, real signals that guide the next step.
When these three run together, ideas don’t float.
They move.
They become part of how the organisation works instead of a side-project nobody adopts.
Why labs fail and backbones don’t
Labs optimise for novelty.
Backbones optimise for repeatable outcomes.
Labs produce showcases.
Backbones produce capability.
Labs deliver concepts.
Backbones deliver things people actually use.
The uncomfortable truth
Most companies don’t need more creativity.
They need fewer handovers, tighter loops, and a predictable way to get things into production.
If you fix that, innovation becomes a side-effect of how you operate.
Not a separate department with its own t-shirts.