Connect the Dots. Spark a Revolution.
Most companies invest in tech but ignore the small ideas that spark revolutions. The next big idea is already inside your company. Ready to find it?
This audio was recorded by AI:
In today’s business world, companies are obsessed with solving problems—yet most don’t even know which problems they actually have. Teams burn through budgets chasing new strategies, new tools, new processes—blind to the fact that the answer is often already buried in their own ecosystem.
Somewhere in the code of an overworked engineer, in the half-formed idea of a call center rep, in the desk-top drawer of shop-floor engineer, in the dusty corner of a legacy product spec—lies the solution. But we keep missing it. What we lack isn’t invention. It’s connection. And we should be furious about it.
Every day, companies lose ideas to the void—tweaks that could have saved time, dollars, or even lives—because they weren’t flashy enough to be heard. We should be angry about how much innovation we’ve lost. About how many employees have stopped speaking up. About how many small ideas die in silence because they didn’t have a champion or a channel.
Radical innovation doesn’t only come from brainstorming sessions in glass-walled boardrooms. It bubbles up from the people closest to the edge—those on the frontlines who see inefficiencies, friction points, and customer behaviors in real time. It percolates in labs where brilliant minds tinker with half-tested hypotheses. But without a structure to connect these two forces—the problem-knowers and the solution-makers—that fruit rots on the vine.
An innovation lead of one of the top three tech firms shared with me recently that a staggering 90% of innovation investment goes toward technology, with only 10% allocated to people. That’s not just a resource imbalance—it’s a misdiagnosis.
Technology doesn’t solve problems. People do. Technology just amplifies their ability to act. When we ignore the insight and ingenuity of our workforce, we build solutions that miss the mark and then wonder why ROI never materializes.
This is where AI and internal idea marketplaces are changing the game.
Google has long pioneered internal innovation with its now legendary “20% time” policy, which allows employees to spend a portion of their time on side projects. This structure gave rise to products like Gmail and AdSense. But now, AI and structured idea platforms make it possible to scale this approach even further.
Pfizer implemented an internal crowdsourcing initiative called PfizerWorks, which used a digital idea platform to solicit process improvements directly from employees. One suggestion led to a new automated system for clinical trial data entry—reducing delays by over 40% and cutting costs by millions annually.
Idea marketplaces, when built well, function like digital synapses. They connect people who never speak. Imagine a Slack thread or a field note becoming a matched entry in a living system of company intelligence. Suddenly, the knowledge isn't just floating—it’s networked.
Radical innovation thrives here. Not because it's flashy, but because it's felt. A nurse at a health tech firm logs a recurring device failure she’s witnessed a dozen times. A design engineer who has never seen a hospital floor notices the note, recalls a prototype shelved last year, and connects the dots. The fix is rolled out in weeks—not quarters.
The impact of AI-enabled innovation platforms is increasingly supported by industry data. According to PwC, companies that integrate AI into their research and development processes have achieved up to a 50% reduction in time-to-market and a 30% decrease in development costs, particularly in industries like automotive and aerospace.
Additionally, McKinsey highlights that AI adoption enhances internal collaboration and decision-making, enabling faster and more effective innovation cycles across organizations.
In an age of automation, the most powerful thing a company can do isn’t just to automate tasks—but to amplify people. The frontline sees the problems. R&D holds the answers. AI helps them meet in the middle.
We’re no longer limited by the ideas we have—we’re limited by the connections we make. Impactful innovation happens when companies drop their obsession with looking outward for new inventions and start listening to their own people.
The Quiet Power of Incremental Innovation
We tend to glamorize radical innovation—moonshots, unicorns, overnight revolutions. But the truth is, radical innovation is impossible without the quiet, often thankless work of incremental innovation. It’s the daily adjustments, the patient tuning, the compounding tweaks over time that build the launchpad for revolutions.
And yet, we waste it. Constantly.
We dismiss small ideas. We bury micro-improvements. We let frontline observations go unrecorded because they don’t feel “big enough.”
We often don’t know what’s radical until much later.
Gmail started as a side project. Post-it Notes were an adhesive experiment gone “wrong.” IKEA’s flat-pack box happened because of an attempt to fit a desk in the back of a car. What feels incremental today may turn out to be a pivot that reshapes the company tomorrow.
Consider honeybees and their environmental effect. They don’t just make honey—they pollinate 80% of the flowering crops that feed humans. Their value isn’t in one single product, but in the quiet, compound effect of their movement. That’s what incremental innovation is: the pollinator of transformation.
Cutting off small innovations before they’ve had a chance to pollinate future change is operational mismanagement.
Assembly lines offer a more humanistic example. When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line in 1913, it was seen as a productivity hack. Not glamorous. Not revolutionary. Just a faster way to put cars together. But it reduced build-time from 12 hours to 90 minutes and eventually redefined industrial manufacturing worldwide.
Big Ideas Start Small
We are bleeding innovation every single day. Quiet ideas—ones that could have saved time, money, or even lives—vanish into the void simply because they weren’t loud or shiny enough to get noticed.
This is where AI and internal idea marketplaces become not just helpful, but essential. They give incremental ideas a place to land, to be seen, to be connected. They archive small fixes that might be dismissed in a team meeting but later turn out to be the missing link in a billion-dollar breakthrough.
Keep pruning shears out of the hands of people who don’t recognize potential.
When AI is trained to find patterns between frontline updates and strategic goals, or between micro-frustrations and macro-opportunities, waste turns into wisdom. The improvement logged by a warehouse worker last week might be the efficiency gain that enables a new product line next year.
We should be deeply concerned about how much innovation we lose every day—the ideas that never surfaced, the employees who stopped speaking up, and the small solutions that faded away simply because they had no one to champion them. But we don’t have to keep wasting it.
Start looking and stop wasting innovation. The answers are already inside your organization, and it’s up to strategy officers and intrapreneurs to find them.
For more insight into radical innovation, foundational changes and idea marketplaces, visit Outthinker.com.