The Innovation Crisis No One’s Talking About

The Skill Gap Sabotaging Modern Innovation

We live in an era where most people only care about outcomes and impact. Ship it. Deliver results. Move fast and break things. Execute, execute, execute.

I’m not against that. Execution matters. But here’s what I keep seeing: teams sprinting toward nowhere, delivering the same safe ideas with slightly better polish, churning out iterations of what already exists. We’ve mistaken repetitive delivery for real progress.

Everyone’s so busy executing that no one’s asking what we’re executing on.

Single Row of identical rubber ducks and a cluster of different rubber ducks on the side

Ideas: The Poorly Cultivated Commodity

I’ve long held the belief that ideas are poorly cultivated commodities. Most organizations treat ideation like a checkbox exercise—throw people in a room, have them brainstorm on sticky notes, vote with dots, then move on to “real work.” The ideas that emerge get evaluated by the same tired criteria: Does it fit our current roadmap? Can we build it this quarter? Will it upset anyone important?

And because of that, I watch great potential get shrugged off daily.

Great ideas aren’t scarce—we just don’t invest in the skills required to refine them into something worth executing.

This is why I focus on bridging the gap between ideas and execution. Not because there’s a shortage of either, but because there’s a massive void in between. Organizations have executors. They have occasional brainstormers. What they don’t have are people who know how to cultivate ideas—to tend them, strengthen them, and determine which ones deserve the resources to grow.

A Quick Example (You’ve Seen This Before)

You’ve probably watched a team ship a beautifully executed feature… that absolutely no one asked for. Or you’ve seen a rough but promising idea get killed because it didn’t fit neatly into an existing template.

I’ve seen teams burn themselves out delivering brilliant execution on mediocre ideas—simply because no one paused long enough to ask why.

What Idea Cultivation Actually Requires

Those who figure out how to cultivate ideas will end up with more innovation than they know what to do with. But that creates a different problem: you now have to develop the discernment to evaluate and prioritize effectively.

Most people don’t have this skillset. They can’t tell the difference between a good idea poorly timed and a mediocre idea with momentum. They confuse passion for viability. They kill promising ideas because they require patience, or greenlight weak ideas because they’re easy to execute.

Here’s what real idea cultivation demands:

Evaluation skills – Understanding what makes an idea worth pursuing beyond gut feeling. Being able to assess feasibility without crushing possibility. Knowing the difference between a flaw that’s fatal and a gap that’s solvable.

Prioritization capacity – Making calls about where to invest limited resources. Saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to great ones. Understanding opportunity cost and strategic alignment.

Conviction – The willingness to champion an idea that needs more than just a yes. Ideas don’t survive on permission alone; they need believers who’ll advocate, protect, and push when things get hard.

Strategic pivoting – The discernment to know when an idea needs adjustment versus abandonment. When to double down and when to cut losses. When resistance means you’re onto something versus when it means you’re forcing something that won’t work.

What Happens When You Don’t Cultivate

When you optimize purely for execution, you get really good at building things efficiently. But you lose the capacity to determine if those things matter. Your innovation muscle atrophies. Your team becomes order-takers, not thinkers. Your culture starts rewarding compliance over creativity.

Eventually, your competitors aren’t the ones executing faster—they’re the ones cultivating better ideas. While you’re optimizing delivery timelines, they’re fundamentally rethinking what should be delivered.

What Happens When You Do

Organizations that master idea cultivation don’t just innovate once—they build systems that generate innovation continuously. They develop leaders who can spot potential in rough concepts. They create cultures where people propose ideas worth fighting for, not just ideas that are safe to suggest.

They understand that the real competitive advantage isn’t speed to market. It’s the ability to consistently identify which markets are worth speeding toward.

That’s the gap most organizations are missing. Not the ability to execute—they’ve got that down. The ability to cultivate ideas worth executing on.

What is your organization doing to help cultivate great ideas instead of just rehashing the same things over and over? How important are ideas seein your role?