Instigating Innovation: How to Build a Culture That Ships New Ideas

By Marc Boudria, Chief Innovation Officer at Betterengineer

Innovation Is a Living Ecosystem, Not a Side Process

I’ve spent more than 3 decades in technology, and roughly half that time has been devoted to R&D and building the kind of environments where new ideas don’t just occasionally survive; they flourish. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that innovation isn’t a process you bolt onto the side of a business. It’s a living ecosystem that demands care, space, and above all, a philosophical clarity about what it truly means to create.

Fear of Failure Kills Creativity and Curiosity

I’ve watched so many companies approach innovation like it’s a performance for shareholders. They create innovation departments as internal PR moves (looking at you, every single major consulting company!), host a few hackathons, buy a neon sign that says "Fail Fast" and then wonder why they never seem to ship anything transformative. These same organizations talk about “celebrating failure,” but still let careers hinge on things going exactly as planned. It’s a fear-based culture wrapped in innovation branding.

In my teams, we never use the word "failure." It’s banished. Not because we pretend everything works out, but because we understand that learning is the whole point. Discovering it doesn’t work the way you thought is not failure; that’s creation. The only real failure is not doing. 

Embrace Flexibility and Adaptation

Be like water. That’s the core ethos I instill in any R&D environment. Water doesn’t crash up against a rock and complain about failure. It finds another path. It flows, pivots, adapts. It has no ego. It doesn’t cling to a single route because it was the first one it imagined. Creative work demands that same fluidity.

You might start chasing an idea down one channel only to realize there’s a more interesting opportunity downstream. If your ego is too tied up in being "right," you’ll miss it. The entire act of exploration is learning. The destination changes as you move. That’s the point.

This is why psychological safety isn’t some warm, fuzzy HR concept; it’s foundational. People cannot be truly creative if they’re terrified of losing their livelihood. If trying something new might mean getting sidelined, losing resources, or being labeled a failure, they will absolutely default to conformity. They’ll protect themselves instead of exploring. IDEO built an entire global reputation on fostering environments where people are safe to be wrong, and therefore, right in surprising ways.

Listen to the Workers, Not Just Leadership

I’ve witnessed this dynamic across the industry too many times to count. Put a leader or their boss in the room, and 95% of the time you’ll get a rosy version of a process that’s actually in trouble, because everyone’s too afraid to speak the truth. Remove that leadership presence, and suddenly you get the real story.

That’s why we always made it a point to meet first with the people actually doing the work, before ever bringing leadership into the room. It let us become a voice for the workers in ways they simply couldn’t be themselves. By involving them early and giving their perspective weight, we sparked a level of investment that had huge ripple effects on change management and the success of new ways of doing X, Y, or Z.

Structure Time and Space to Honor Exploration

Part of creating that safety means designing practical structures that honor exploration. I once had the immense privilege of spending a few hours talking with a Chief Innovation Officer from a very respected embedded tech company. They built many of the tools we relied on in our own R&D work. We went deep into how they approached planning, pivoting, and building. He said something that has stuck with me to this day.

"When you’re working on anything, especially in a production capacity, your brain starts to fill up with all these little ideas. Over a few months, these grow into nagging distractions. They occupy more and more mental space, and eventually you lose focus."

To combat mental clutter, they structured their sprints to run 8–10 weeks, followed by two weeks dedicated to exploration. During this time, individuals could chase down the creative distractions that had been living rent-free in their heads. But it wasn’t a free-for-all. Before starting, they had to outline what they’d explore, define parts, sketch a loose plan, and describe what success might look like.

They also had to talk it through, not for approval, but to pressure-test the idea out loud. That simple act often clarified or reshaped the concept entirely.

This process meant they could hit the ground running when their two weeks began. The company reaped huge benefits, not just in maintaining production velocity, but by harvesting a constant flow of fresh concepts that often became the seeds for entirely new products.

Intentional Curiosity Drives Results 

That discipline around exploration is what so many organizations miss. They either don’t carve out time at all, or they throw up a suggestion box and wonder why nothing materializes. You have to create structured space for curiosity. At Pixar, they run internal "braintrust" sessions where directors openly share half-baked ideas and peers are invited to poke holes, not to tear down, but to help them see around corners.

Lockheed’s Skunkworks, who I’ve been lucky enough to sit down with, famously builds dedicated environments, physically and organizationally, to keep politics, bureaucracy, and short-term profit pressures away from the people trying to birth the future.

In my own teams, one of the most powerful tools has been letting everyone (not just engineers) do rotations through R&D. Designers, QA, product owners, strategists, and the entire talent stack got to step into that exploratory space. It built empathy, expanded creative literacy, and made innovation a shared muscle, not a siloed department. When these folks returned to production, they brought that same adaptability with them. They were more likely to challenge assumptions or voice the weird idea that just might be genius.

Not Everyone Thrives in Both Production and R&D

It’s important to be honest about something here: not everyone is cut out for the uncertainty, the speed, or the radical fluidity of self that comes with doing true R&D or future-first innovation work.

We saw plenty of amazing production-focused people absolutely excel in structured environments, but crumble under the ambiguity and shifting sands of exploratory projects. That’s not a failing on their part; it cuts both ways.

Building a Culture That Ships Ideas Means Creating Safety and Support

Ultimately, fostering innovation is about building a culture that doesn’t just tolerate the unexpected but actively seeks it out. It’s about stripping away the punishment of "failure," recognizing that learning is the only meaningful outcome of any experiment. It’s about designing your systems so that curiosity isn’t squeezed out by the relentless push of production. And above all, it’s about having the humility to let go of your ego and flow where the discovery leads.

That’s how you build a culture that ships new ideas. Not by erecting an innovation theater, but by creating an environment where people are safe, supported, and expected to explore. Where they can be like water. And where the next breakthrough is just the natural result of the current flowing forward.

Let's Build Innovation Together

If this resonates and you’re serious about building a culture that truly ships new ideas, whether you want to explore these philosophies further or bring in a fractional Chief Innovation Officer to help architect it inside your organization, we would love to connect.