Your innovation lab isn’t the problem. Keeping innovation isolated there is.
The pattern shows up in different forms—innovation labs, Centers of Excellence, digital transformation teams. The setup looks similar: bring in smart people, give them freedom to experiment, then wait for breakthroughs while the core business operates exactly as before.
I’ve watched this play out at multiple Fortune 500 companies. The lab discovers what customers need. Core business teams keep building the same way they always have. When the lab’s insights finally reach leadership, the response is “interesting, we’ll prioritize that next quarter.” By then, a competitor has already shipped.
Here’s the test: Try naming three companies where innovation labs successfully spread their methods across the entire organization. Not companies with famous labs. Companies where the lab’s thinking transformed how core business teams operate.
I can’t name many. That scarcity tells you something.
The Superstar Trap
The traditional model treats innovation like a superstar problem. Hire the best people. Give them the best tools. Isolate them from the constraints of the core business. Wait for breakthroughs.
This fails more often than it succeeds.
When innovation lives in one team, that team becomes a bottleneck. Every insight has to flow through them. Every experiment needs their approval. The rest of the organization waits for direction instead of building their own capacity to improve.
The labs that actually work don’t stay separate. They seed methods, not solutions. They build innovation muscle across teams instead of concentrating it in one place. They make their job obsolete by teaching the rest of the organization how to think.
That’s not a superstar model. That’s a systems model.
What Spreading Looks Like
Innovation in your core business doesn’t look like moonshots. It looks like your claims team is cutting approval time from five days to three using better automation. Your integration team is building reusable patterns instead of custom work each time. Your product managers are using AI tools to run discovery in days instead of weeks.
These changes compound. Today you improve one process. Tomorrow, another team sees what you did and adapts it. Next week, an adjacent team asks how you did it. That’s how innovation spreads—not through mandates, but through demonstration.
The lab’s job isn’t to own innovation. It’s to seed champions across the organization. Find the engineer in your payments team who sees a better way. The product manager in member services who wants to rethink onboarding. Give them methods, support, and air cover. Let them show their peers what’s possible.
The Directional Test
You won’t get 100% of your organization innovating. Some teams will lag. Some functions exist just to keep things running. That’s fine.
The question is directional. Are more teams thinking about improvement this quarter than last? Is innovation behavior spreading or staying contained?
When only one part of your organization thinks about innovation, you’re in trouble. When your core business teams stop asking “how do we improve this?” they treat their domain as frozen. They wait for the lab to tell them what’s next. Meanwhile, your competitors are moving.
Innovation dies when one team owns it. It lives when everyone has permission to improve how they work. The companies winning today aren’t the ones with the best labs. They’re the ones where core business teams have built the innovation muscle—where innovation becomes part of the culture, not a separate function.
What’s your lab spreading this quarter?