Reigniting the Innovation Pipeline with Insights

Shiny metal curving pipes or spokes.

Challenges to Innovation Strategy

In the study, entitled “Innovation Reignited,” innovation ranks as the number one strategic priority, with 82% of C-suite leaders expecting new product/service development to become even more important over the next three years. Yet at the same time, 60% of survey respondents said their organizations are not effective at generating and executing innovation.

The newly published report, conducted by Market Logic, Ipsos, and Alchemy-RX, reveals various gaps in execution of innovation but at the same time offers some takeaways for companies to deploy in the aim of reinforcing innovation readiness. The C-suite research on innovation surveyed 250 CEO’s and senior executives working in CPG, healthcare, and other industries.

The survey also found that innovation isn’t meeting launch goals (93% of executive leaders stated in the survey) and isn’t reaching its revenue potential, with only 1/3 of leaders stating that innovation will generate over 20% of revenue over the next three years. Artificial intelligence is sometimes seen as a “silver bullet” to these issues, but the survey also found that while the majority agree that AI will be extremely important to innovation over the next three to five years, only 32% of AI users report improved idea generation and innovation.

Other key findings of the study include detailing the challenges to innovation, which include not enough or not the right insights; underestimating or underdelivering differentiated innovation; and de-prioritized or non-strategic innovation management.

In fact, the study also noted that 75% of innovations fail to meet expectations because they are disconnected from the consumer.

Bringing Insights to the Forefront of the Ecosystem

Another key finding of the study is that while AI has helped companies gain data, there is also the common refrain of “drowning in data.” About 91% of respondents said the sheer volume of data has limited their organizations’ success. Barriers to meaningful innovation include that not enough insights from that data are available to develop more ideas and that there is a lack of understanding the consumer as a result.

But if there’s a silver lining here for innovators, it’s that many companies can find their pathway back to innovation growth—with the help of AI, insights and market research. Investing in insights, data and research as strategic capabilities is one key avenue to success. The companies’ research signals that you can recommit to innovation in steps such as:

  1. Use your Data as Raw Material: Invest in tools and talent to make sense of data across sources. Learn what metrics matter most. Leverage AI to synthesize and surface patterns.
  2. Invest in Strategic Consumer Research: Build a roadmap with the right research partner to uncover motivations, barriers, unmet needs and white space – using sound methodologies, not shortcuts.
  3. Synthesize Across Datasets: Layer data to uncover true insights – market share + consumer qual + trend reports + brand performance. Use technology to centralize this and foster cross‑functional discussions around what it means.
  4. Flex your Insight & Foresight Muscle: Create the conditions for insights to be uncovered, shared, and acted upon. Embed insights into strategic planning. Raise the standard of what qualifies as an insight. Teach your teams to look for contradictions, patterns, and opportunities. And don’t stop there; look forward to plausible future scenarios with foresight.
  5. Ideate from Insight: Use your insights to spark ideas. Build ideas that solve real consumer problems in new, compelling ways. Provide incremental and new value to consumers, relevant to their needs and different from how they solve for it today.

Managing Innovation Through Differentiation

The research report from Market Logic, Ipsos, and Alchemy-RX also examines the role of differentiation in product innovation as well as innovation management structure.

Standing out and differentiating innovation has never been harder to achieve or mattered more than in this current environment of AI “slop,” as some have termed the phrase. Differentiating from the competition and having unique products that stand out to consumers remains a relevant focus for CPG companies and beyond. But the lack of differentiation remains a key barrier to meaningful innovation.

The survey again points to the potential of insights to make a difference in overcoming these barriers. Only 45% of respondents selected consumer research as the place where innovation ideas come from. That’s a significant disconnect but that gap also signals an opportunity for growth.

Aligning business strategy, brand positioning, and innovation efforts can help build that innovation funnel and drive growth. Additional recommendations from the report include:

  1. Set clear goals for innovation.
  2. Audit and risk-adjust your funnel.
  3. Distinguish renovation from innovation.
  4. Generate more (and better) ideas.
  5. Manage innovation as a system.

The research report makes the case that innovation-led growth has stalled a bit in today’s market. These barriers are making companies pull back on innovation. But insights can prove to be a powerful tool to stop this decline. The researchers advise: “This is precisely when innovation matters most. It’s not just a response to opportunity, it’s a defense against decline.”

Video: “Innovation Reignited: Why CEOs can’t afford to stand still,” courtesy of Ipsos.

Turning Up the Volume: The Art of Stakeholder Engagement

A volume icon from a laptop or smart phone.

Drawing from over 30 years of experience in web design and data visualization, Shander explains that stakeholders often don’t know what they actually need and are often driven by subconscious biases. He advocates for “stakeholder whispering” methods to guide stakeholders to discover their real needs through empathetic questioning, rather than simply gathering requirements.

Shander emphasizes that this two-way learning process helps stakeholders gain insights about their own needs while ensuring that data dashboards and reports truly serve their intended purpose. He highlights key skills for insights and innovation professionals including empathy, curiosity, and what he calls “useful paranoia”—questioning every request as a starting point rather than accepting it at face value.

Understanding Stakeholder Needs

All Things Innovation: Thanks so much, Bill, for coming on with us today to talk about your book, Stakeholder Whispering. Let’s set the stage: You have a lot of experience as an author, a speaker, an instructor, focusing on data storytelling, information design, and data visualization, which is really to the heart of the insights professional. And you’ve written a book that came out last year from Wiley, Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask. It’s a great title.

What inspired you to write Stakeholder Whispering? How did your personal and professional experience kind of shape the ideas in the book?

Bill Shander: The basic idea, and the reason I was inspired to do it, is all the work that I’ve done for my entire 30-plus year career in preparing content for people. I used to do web design and development, then I was doing data storytelling and visualization. Whether you’re creating a data dashboard or a report, insights packaged up for somebody in whatever way, shape, or form, those insights are there for a reason. Someone’s consuming that report in order to learn and to make a decision. This data, and these insights, they don’t exist in a vacuum.

They serve a purpose. If you don’t understand the purpose that they’re meant to serve, then it’s a giant waste of time. My entire career, whether I was designing a website and a client might ask me, hey, can you make the buttons on the website blue? I would say, well, maybe, let’s talk about why you want the website buttons to be blue. They would say something like, well, we want them to be noticeable. We really want them to stand out, to pop. OK, so what you really need is noticeable buttons. You want people to click on the buttons. That’s the actual need. Now blue may be the answer. We’ll figure it out together, but we have got to identify the real need, whether it’s a website or an insights report, whatever the case is, you have to understand your stakeholders.

When Wiley approached me to do this book, they originally approached me to do a data visualization and data storytelling book, and there’s a million of those. I just never wanted to write that book for a variety of reasons. But I had this idea because this is probably the most important skill I’ve developed. Any success I’ve had is because I was really good at understanding my actual clients’ needs, not because I was so great at design or storytelling and any of the rest of it, to be honest.

The Art of Conversation

All Things Innovation: You bring up a lot of great points. The market research field is awash in dashboards and reports, always focused on engaging the stakeholder, making sure that their work has impact and influence, influencing stakeholders, and trying to make strategic decisions.In terms of the book, you emphasized the importance of understanding and managing stakeholders effectively. What mistakes do we commonly make when we are trying to engage stakeholders?

Bill Shander: I think the very first one, especially if it’s literally your job to produce that dashboard or report, is to assume that the stakeholders know what they need from you. Because guess what? They don’t. They are not data experts, which is one part of it.

But more importantly, human beings are all driven by their subconscious. We’re not very good at reasoning. This is proven by decades of research. If you really allow yourself to look at that square in the face, you’ll recognize that when someone asks you, hey, make this dashboard with this data, the first thing you need to do is just question whether that’s really what’s needed.

It’s the first thing. Recognize that they’re being driven by their subconscious, their own biases, the fact that they’ve always done it that way, the fact that somebody else did it that way last month. That’s why they’re asking you to do it, not necessarily because it’s what is actually needed. Start there, recognize that that may not be the need. And then from there, you can do what needs to be done.

I talk in the book about the technique, the art, of having these conversations, but you have to start from that point. And if you’re the stakeholder, if you’re the one asking for a dashboard, recognizing yourself, you’re asking for a dashboard because everybody’s making dashboards left and right all the time these days.

Of course, the first thing you think of is, well, I guess we need a dashboard. Slow it down and ask yourself, wait, maybe do we need a dashboard or is there something else that will solve my actual problem? Really think about the underlying need that you have in addition to what your stakeholders have. The first mistake that people and organizations make to your question is to not do that, to sort of take everything at face value.

Guiding Through ‘Whispering’

All Things Innovation: It’s a provocative point. Maybe they don’t need that dashboard after all. Let’s shift gears for a second here. You talk about whispering in the title of your book, which suggests a very nuanced and empathetic approach to stakeholder management. Can you elaborate on what you mean by whispering and how it differs from traditional stakeholder engagement?

Bill Shander: By the way, it is a provocative point. I think it’s a fair thing to say that. And I’m not saying that every dashboard request is wrong. Like 95% of them may be absolutely spot on. But there’s always going to be something missing or something that needs to be slightly tweaked in that request and that’s what you need to do the whispering for.

Now to your next question, you might be familiar with the horse whisperer from the famous book and then movie. The basic idea is that rather than beating the horse in order to get it to do what you want it to do, to train the horse to be able to be rideable, some people can whisper in the horse’s ear and understand what the horse really is trying to do in order to get the horse to do what you need. That’s where the word comes from.

In stakeholder whispering, it’s really important to recognize that, let me phrase it this way. The difference between stakeholder whispering and what we usually do is this. What we usually do is needs assessment, or requirements gathering. In other words, you asked me to make a dashboard, I’m going say, what data do you have? Tell me what do you need in the dashboard? What other requirements? I get the list of things like the rules I should follow and then I do it.

But if I go back to what I said before, and I wonder if that’s really what’s needed, the whispering takes a different form. It actually seems very similar as I am asking questions, but there’s a really important difference. What I recommend you do is you actually use the Socratic method. The Socratic dialogue is this. I ask questions not to learn from the answers, although that will happen. It is like needs assessment. I ask questions, I will learn what you need and what the requirements are. But more importantly, I’m actually asking questions to help my stakeholder learn.

It’s a two-way learning process. I’m asking the questions and they’ll be in answering the questions, learning about their own needs. It’s like therapy. So literally, it will be guiding them essentially towards an insight. In the example, someone says, make me a dashboard. And I started asking my questions, who’s going to use it? What decisions do they need to make? What is the data you have? In that process, at some point, if we’re lucky and it doesn’t always happen, but at some point they may say wait a second. Yes. Hold on. I never thought about it that way. You’re right. That data doesn’t do this, it actually does that. The decision needs to be this, not that.

In other words, I’ve helped them see for themselves what they really need from me. They’re clarifying the request. Again, it’s more important that I’m guiding them to the insight, helping them figure out what they need from me than just gathering requirements. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s really important.

Developing Empathy

All Things Innovation: It’s just a little bit of a different way of engaging stakeholders to reach those needs. For someone in the insights or innovation world, a market researcher, what are some key skills or qualities that they can develop in order to become more effective stakeholder whisperers?

Bill Shander: You mentioned one earlier, which is empathy. You have to be empathetic in order to do this well. I must really understand my stakeholder and try to anticipate what they might be thinking, feeling, needing in the context of the situation in order to do a good job guiding them towards their insights. Therapists are very empathetic so that they can do a good job guiding someone towards that insight that they’re trying to get in that case in their personal life.

Empathy is a really important one and it’s important for people to realize, we think that empathy is like a natural state, but it’s not. Empathy is learnable. You can develop empathy. You can work on your empathy. Another related concept which is also interestingly learnable is curiosity. Because if you don’t care, you’re not going to really be a very good stakeholder whisperer. But if you’re excited and interested in your organization, the data that you’re looking at, you’re curious about it, then you will genuinely want to find the answer. Therefore, you’re going to be more effective guiding these conversations to try to get to the heart of the matter because you care.

Those are two really good skills to develop. A third tactical skill is coming up with good questions. Being in that mode helps illuminate your concept. And I can talk a little bit about one of the techniques that I recommend using if we have time. But you know, asking questions is hard because you also have to be a really good listener. You have to be listening and not always thinking of the follow-up question and yet also be good at follow-up questions. There’s a lot of tension in that because you must truly listen to hear the underlying need and to guide them.

All Things Innovation: Innovation teams should have a lot of empathy for their consumer. Yet there’s also this empathy for the stakeholder and knowing what their needs and goals are and working with them.

Bill Shander: Yes. Empathy for the consumer, or whoever the most important stakeholders are, which includes the consumer, it includes the end user of the product, and so on. Their needs may completely outweigh your stakeholders. So your stakeholder may say do X, but your job is also to help them remember that the ultimate stakeholder is the consumer. Recognizing you have all kinds of stakeholders, your boss may be here, someone else may be here, you prioritize that list and help them keep their eye on the real need of the stakeholder, which might be the customer.

Driven by the Subconscious

All Things Innovation: One final thought. For readers new to stakeholder management or new to your book, what’s a key takeaway or piece of advice that you hope they will gain from the book?

Bill Shander: I honestly think the most important one is to remember and act on the fact that we’re all driven by our subconscious. Everything that happens, including stakeholder requests, is the starting point, not the end point. Your boss says jump, you don’t say how high. And it’s not because you’re going to push back and not do it. It’s the starting point. To investigate that request to jump and ask yourself and ask them, is jumping what’s really needed? Is it about the height or could it be about the distance or could it be about something else completely? Have those conversations. Engage what I call your useful paranoia. Assume that every request, everything is a yes, maybe, but maybe not. There might be an issue with a problem, something missing, some nuance that needs to be teased out. Start from that standpoint, and then everything you do in the end will be much better.

All Things Innovation: Bill, thanks so much for coming on and talking about your book, Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask.

Editor’s Note: For more information about Stakeholder Whispering by Bill Shander, visit the Amazon book store.

Video: Interview with Bill Shander courtesy of All Things Insights.

The New Productivity Frontier in Innovation

A bulletin board with a variety of white and colored blank scraps of paper on it.

Key trends also include deploying agentic AI and autonomous systems, embracing open ecosystem partnerships, and shifting toward decentralized, employee-led innovation. These trends emphasize a shift toward a more collaborative, agile, and technology-forward approach, aiming for faster time-to-market and increased efficiency.

A Shift in Innovation Ecosystems

In Itonics’ report, “2026 Top Trends in Corporate Innovation,” the company explores these trends and identifies more nuanced shifts in the corporate innovation mindset. The report analysis was mined from over 1,000-plus conversations that separate innovation performers from storytellers, the company said.

The bottom line is that corporate innovation teams in 2026 no longer get credit merely for activity—they’re expected to deliver measurable business impact. In this new phase of productivity, according to Itonics, the shift in thinking turns innovation from fragmented and scattered initiatives into a more integrated ecosystem. Itonics further notes that this entails teams to coordinate AI, tighten portfolio discipline, and redesign governance, culture, and partnerships to achieve higher innovation ROI with fewer resources.

Top Trends in Corporate Innovation

Itonics notes that, “After years of building teams, running pilots, and driving cultural change, the mandate is shifting from exploration to measurable value creation. In 2026, innovation decentralizes, visibility recenters, and performance replaces promise.” The company’s report further asserts how corporate innovation management needs to become more disciplined, transparent, and productive.

This is, of course, a challenge that many innovation teams face every year as they are buffeted by familiar headwinds such as cuts in resources and budgets, reorganizations, and doing more with less. Accountability, it seems, is more focused than ever as teams are becoming less detached from the business and more connected to other business units and revenue growth goals. “Innovation only creates value when it is embedded in business and product decisions, not positioned alongside them,” notes Itonics.

Itonics, in its report, further distills its top trends in six shifts that it has seen in corporate innovation:

  • Trend 1: AI coordination becomes a strategic asset. Governance, coordination, and measurable value creation replace scattered experimentation. Organizations that treat AI as an integrated system rather than a scattershot of pilots are already outperforming their peers. Coordination will have become one of the most critical capabilities in corporate innovation.
  • Trend 2: From ROI to Return on Augmented Innovation. AI augments capacity, and success is measured by speed, evidence, and business impact. The most credible innovators will not be those who simply deploy AI, but those who instrument innovation, making learning, scaling, and performance measurable in real time.
  • Trend 3: Unified Innovation Project Management Offices (PMOs). Visibility is centralized, while control and execution remain distributed across the business. Once confined to isolated departments, innovation responsibility now again lives in R&D, digital, and business operations. This decentralization has accelerated delivery and strengthened ownership but has also fractured visibility, duplicated effort, and blurred accountability. Credibility will rest on governance intelligence, the ability to coordinate, measure, and compound innovation across the enterprise.
  • Trend 4: The rise of the modular partnership model. Flexible, portfolio-based partnerships are replacing rigid, long-term alliances. The key is adaptive networks. The innovation operating model will hinge on the intelligence of partnership governance. The ability to design, coordinate, compound and scale modular collaborations will define the next competitive frontier in corporate innovation.
  • Trend 5: Portfolio decisions reconnect with market realities. AI-augmented foresight integrates directly with portfolio steering and resource allocation. Always-on intelligence is key to innovation efforts and to speed the process along, shortening the insights to action lifecycle. As a result, Itonics notes that “market intelligence evolves into a sentient system, acting as a continuous intelligent feedback loop that connects sensing, deciding, and doing in real time.”
  • Trend 6: Culture scales through defined systems. Clear processes, infrastructure, and transparency replace vague cultural mandates. Innovation culture can be designed, measured, and managed. Innovation culture will no longer depend on leadership style or inspiration but on systemic clarity and infrastructure that enables autonomy with accountability.

Integrating Innovation Productivity

Productivity and governance of innovation seem to be key threads that are woven throughout the Itonics report on top corporate innovation trends for 2026. Rather than fragmented, disconnected efforts, innovation can be unified into a connected system of capabilities, a coordinated infrastructure that can unlock integrated innovation productivity.

Integration is the new innovation frontier, says Itonics: “The future of innovation lies not in new tools or slogans but in the deliberate design of connected systems where foresight, portfolio management, and governance reinforce each other continuously.”

Video: “Triathlons, Innovation & Grit: How Resideo Wins Bold Bets,” courtesy of Itonics.

Bridging the Divide: How Key Players Drive Collaborative Innovation

A man jumping over an impossibly large canyon with river below.

These bridgers act as the connective tissue in collaborative innovation networks, moving beyond transactional partnerships to foster trust and mutual commitment among partners—including employees, customers, suppliers, and even competitors.

Bridging Innovation Barriers

Innovation often succeeds or fails based on the quality of the partnerships and collaboration involved. With AI reshaping workflows and product management, it’s becoming increasingly important to partner with the right teams to scale innovation. But innovation can be a complex task, and the partnerships meant to deliver an initiative can often break down.

In the Harvard Business Review article, “Why Great Innovations Fail to Scale,” the authors explore the qualities that make leaders excel at collaborating across boundaries. They note, “Scaling innovation requires partners to collaborate in the face of diverging priorities, capabilities, and constraints. New product teams are incentivized to experiment; compliance prioritizes adherence to regulatory requirements; IT speaks the language of operational reliability; senior executives require a compelling business case. When collaborating externally, the gaps are even wider. For startups, time is money; they value speed. The corporations that partner with them prioritize reliability; they move at a more measured pace to mitigate risks.”

With all these divergent operational capabilities, it takes what the article identifies as “bridgers” that can collaborate across these different divides. Establishing formal structures, such as a project manager or an innovation lab, sometimes is not enough to bridge the gap.

The article authors note that, “Our study of firms that get innovation right finds that a particular type of leadership—what we call “bridging”—drives collaboration effectively across boundaries. [The authors explore the role more fully in their book, Genius at Scale, which will be available from the Harvard Business Review Press in March]. Bridgers have strong emotional and contextual intelligence, which enables them to build trust, influence, and commitment across partners that are essential to move innovation forward.

The authors go further and identify how bridgers perform three critical functions: They curate partners, translate across boundaries, and integrate partners’ disparate efforts. These activities are fluid parts of the process which foster:

  • Mutual trust. Because innovation across boundaries carries risk and can make people feel vulnerable, bridgers create an environment where people are willing and able to tackle the inevitable conflicts and missteps that arise.
  • Mutual influence. In a collaboration, no single party has all the answers. Bridgers build a sense of joint ownership by inviting partners and stakeholders to share in key decisions, continuously balancing the need for participation with the need for expediency.
  • Mutual commitment.  Commitment to innovation can wane, especially after setbacks or during conflict. Bridgers maintain engagement and motivation by keeping partners focused on their shared intention and by standing alongside them to fight the fires that emerge along the way.

Overcoming Innovation Roadblocks

In the blog, “Moving Past Innovation Roadblocks,” All Things Innovation examined some common barriers to innovation and strategies to overcome them. With the pace of change accelerating, fostering innovation in corporate enterprises can be a challenging task—a task that is very much dependent on the innovation culture, the team, the leadership, stakeholder engagement, cross collaboration, and other key factors. Some companies may find themselves ineffective at innovation or transformative initiatives. They’ve hit the roadblocks of innovation. Here, we look at a few of the common challenges that prevent innovation, what might be the cause of such problems, and a few solutions that could be leveraged.

Honing Intelligent Innovation Tactics

Harvard Business Review’s article points out that bridgers need both emotional intelligence and contextual intelligence to thrive and develop successful collaboration methods.

Emotional Intelligence: Innovating through partnerships means navigating ambiguity and conflict without being in direct control. But their strength lies in their ability to manage their emotions, stay motivated and optimistic, and take the long view as they build relationships. Above all, their empathy is foundational to understanding the needs, perspectives, and feelings of those they seek to connect with and influence. It informs their conflict management skills and underpins their ability to collaborate across differences.

Contextual Intelligence: Bridgers take the time to discover each innovation partner’s unique context. Instead of making assumptions, they learn through inquiry and observation how that context shapes their partner’s mindset and behaviors. Bridgers seek to understand the forces that underlie the differences among stakeholders, and then they make those differences explicit and work to reconcile them. Perhaps most important, bridgers use their contextual intelligence to anticipate and respond to signals of resistance.

Innovation is an imperative in today’s business environment, but roadblocks and poor communication can derail the best of intentions. But to move innovation forward, bridgers should be seen as a must-have, argue the authors of the HBR article: “Companies that develop these leaders deliberately—finding potential bridgers, giving them boundary-spanning experiences, and providing executive backing—will outpace their competitors in turning bold ideas into market realities.”

Video: “How to Build Teams of Innovators: Linda Hill,” courtesy of MIT Sloan Management Review.