If innovation is return, impacto, income… why don´t we innovate more?
During the time I´ve been working on innovation and, in my case, boosting the use of technologies by entities through the transfer process, I´ve been able to speak and see examples of why do we find difficult to innovate.
We find it difficult because we struggle to dedicate time, resources and energy to planning what to innovate in, because we find it hard to accept that competition is growing because it has made innovation its main strategy.
Because we find it hard to propose new ways of doing things, new projects, new ideas to our superiors, because it’s easier to stick with what we’ve always done and not get involved in “other issues.”
Because it´s hard for us to leave that comfort zone, of that acquired routine that, although it no longer challenges us, offers us security in achieving results.
We struggle because innovation means venturing into uncertainty, and that scares us. We fear error, the possibility of failure, the idea that the resources we put in may not yield the expected results.
We struggle because the unknown is frightening, and even more so when achieving it requires overcoming certain barriers and facing risks that, although sometimes known, we don’t always understand how to manage.
It´s also difficult for us because innovation requires a change in mindset. It’s not just about investing in new technologies or products; it’s about transforming our way of thinking, questioning what we take for granted.
We struggle because we often prefer what we know, even if it means remaining stagnant.
And yet, the truth is that the real risk isn’t in innovating, but in not doing so. The real danger lies in looking to the future and realizing that we’ve been surpassed by those who dared to change.
For all these reasons, the key to innovation is understanding and, above all, accepting that risk is part of the process. This way, you can identify how risk affects you and establish the conditions to mitigate it.
“The key to innovation is understanding and, above all, accepting that risk is part of the process.”
How to manage risk in innovation
A risk management system inherent to the innovation process is the first step toward unlocking this fear of innovation. This isn’t just a theoretical process, but rather a matter of implementing certain concrete actions that create an ideal environment to stimulate innovation.
In my experience, the factors that are crucial for creating a good risk mitigation system are:
Create your own innovation ecosystem and surround yourself with strategic partners: technology centers, universities, startups, client or supplier companies to promote the transfer of know-how from these entities and accelerate collective learning, thus reducing the time to impact.
Planning innovation budgets: allocating specific resources to innovative projects within a specific timeframe, avoiding innovation depending on improvisation or success associated with competitive competition. Resources should not be allocated that jeopardize the organization’s core business, but sufficient resources should act as a driving force. One percent of a year’s budget is already a lot. It’s important because just as what isn’t on the agenda isn’t a priority, what isn’t budgeted doesn’t exist.
Leadership drive: Firm commitment from the top is the engine that gives legitimacy and continuity to innovation and allows the ecosystem you’ve chosen to endure over time and achieve results. This commitment is reflected in actions, not only budgetary but also through participation in meetings on new initiatives or in ecosystem analysis and selection.
Implement innovative routines: Incorporate practices that make innovation a constant. Innovation isn’t a one-time or improvised effort. It’s about encouraging trial and error and fostering ideation, the generation of new proposals for change, and an entrepreneurial spirit among teams. It’s about creating an innovative culture that permeates the organization horizontally.
Adapted profitability indicators: Designing specific metrics that realistically measure innovation, considering technological and market maturity and its potential impact and scalability. This means moving away from traditional economic indicators, which are adequately designed for investment projects or continuous improvement projects in general, but are ill-equipped to measure the results or profitability of risky projects that require much broader and more flexible ranges and that require accepting the need to abandon a project at a certain point.
All of this pursues a very clear objective: to build CONFIDENCE in the process, because if risk is a constant in innovation, trust is the constant that balances it.
Trust is like the lifeblood of innovation processes because it’s what we don’t see, but it connects all the elements that make innovation possible and, above all, helps mitigate risk. Trust connects people’s courage to propose ideas, management’s vision to drive them forward, and relationships with your ecosystem. It helps you acknowledge and accept that mistakes are part of learning and the innovation process.
Ultimately, the key is that innovation doesn’t progress solely through technology or resources; it progresses through the people who drive it and, above all, through the shared trust between them. This trust is what turns risk into opportunity and allows us to bring the future into the present.
Innovate for you, innovate for me, innovate for us.
Talking about Dubai means revisiting the Innovating R&D posts on the CARTIF blog. It means discussing the characteristics of ecosystems that foster resilience and help avoid “lotus flower” scenarios. It means reflecting on the essence and purpose that keep us in constant motion and make us feel fulfilled. It’s about engaging in continuous, repetitive routines of trial and error to achieve breakthroughs through innovation. It means encouraging a demand for innovation that prevents undervaluing its true worth. Ultimately, it means giving the attention it deserves to our beloved “i” of Innovation.
The lotus flower, capable of blooming in the mud, has long symbolized perseverance, transformation, and beauty that emerges from adversity. Dubai has flourished in a naturally adverse environment, positioning itself as one of the most powerful innovation ecosystems in the world. Dubai shares that spirit: in the heart of the desert, it has built not just a city, but a vision of the future. A vision not limited to the present, but one that boldly embraces innovation as the driving force of its strategic development.
Dubai is not a product of chance. It is the result of an ambitious roadmap, built on political and economic decisions that have placed innovation at the core of its identity. Initiatives like Vision 2040, the Blockchain Strategy, Smart Cities, and incentives for startups in fields such as AI, fintech, sustainability, or health are not isolated gestures — they are essential components of a model designed to anticipate the challenges of tomorrow.
Free zones, tech hubs, acceleration programs, and urban experimentation spaces reflect Dubai’s commitment to being a living lab for disruptive solutions. Dubai understands that building the future is not about waiting for it to arrive, but about designing it in the present — with a mindset open to collaboration, adaptable, dynamic, and deeply strategic.
“Building the future is designing it in the present”
Experiencing Dubai from the inside reveals much more than the shine of its skyscrapers. Its multiculturalism, obsession with efficiency, and rapid execution capabilities make it fertile ground for those looking to turn ideas into real-world impact. Amid cultural contrasts and social challenges, a spirit of perseverance stands out: every step, every investment, every reform is aligned with a long-term, shared goal.
Like the lotus flower that rises above murky waters, Dubai blossoms on arid land thanks to its roots: vision, strategy, and innovation. It is precisely that connection between resilience and future that makes it a global benchmark for those who believe that innovation ecosystems are not improvised, they are built.
In just a few decades, the city has evolved from a small trading port to a futuristic metropolis, driven by a visionary development model rooted in economic diversification, free zones with unique incentives, and a strong commitment to technological innovation. This transformation is not only the result of strategic decisions, but of a mindset open to change and entrepreneurship, which enables the attraction of talent, investment, and global opportunities.
Dubai blends ambitious megaprojects and cutting-edge infrastructure with a multiculturalism felt in every corner: over 200 nationalities coexist in an environment where adaptability is key. Initiatives such as Vision 2040 or the Blockchain Strategy reflect the emirate’s long-term approach, with a strong focus on technology and continuous improvement of the business landscape.
From a personal perspective, living and experiencing Dubai means confronting its contrasts: luxury and austerity, tradition and modernity, the local and the global. This duality doesn’t weaken its model — it enriches it. Despite ongoing cultural or social tensions, what truly stands out is its capacity for constant reinvention, creating an ecosystem where startups, major corporations, and innovation coexist and thrive.
Dubai represents the power of rising boldly from complex conditions. Its apparent perfection may seem artificial, but it is precisely that relentless drive for improvement that fuels its ongoing progress. Along that path, it becomes not only a business benchmark, but also a symbol of what strategic vision, global openness, and resilience can achieve.
Innovate for you, innovate for me, innovate for us.
When an organisation decides to invest in innovation, it often activates not only a technical or strategic process, but also an internal dynamic that complicates decision-making. What at first appears to be a clear commitment soon becomes a chain of uncertainties, cross-validations and multiple opinions. It is as if the organisational chart stretches vertically and widens horizontally. Where once there was a clear direction, new levels of decision-making appear… more departments are involved… new voices feel the need to evaluate, question or even redefine the proposal. And while this cross-cutting interest in innovation processes shows that the subject matters, it also introduces noise, friction and, often, paralysis… so much analysis!!!!
Innovation managers know this all too well. They face the daily challenge of justifying why it is necessary to invest in an idea that has not yet shown a return, and explaining why it is not possible to continue doing the same old thing, even if it seems safer. They live with tight budgets, uncertain timelines and the need to align expectations with multiple stakeholders, each with their own vision of what it means to ‘innovate’.
In this context, many key decisions end up depending more on the mood of the day than on the strategic logic that should support the decision. Innovation then becomes a sort of corporate game of chance. Like when, as children, we used to pluck a daisy to find out if someone loved us:
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‘Now they approve of me… now they don’t. Now they see it clearly… now they don’t. Now we invest… now we don’t’.’
Although it may seem anecdotal, this dynamic has real consequences. Innovation cannot depend on chance, nor on a succession of subjective ‘yeses’ or ‘noes’. Because while there is doubt, the market moves on, opportunities expire, technologies consolidate and the one that improves competitiveness is someone else. And the most worrying thing is that when this logic is repeated many times, it ends up discouraging the teams that drive innovation from within. Frustration builds up, motivation drops, and what could have been a culture of change towards organisational prosperity becomes a culture of restraint and unease.
This is where technology centres play a key role. Our mission is not to replace business decision-making, but to reduce the risk that surrounds it. We act as agents that provide objectivity, knowledge and technical validation in the different phases of innovation projects:
We develop proofs of concept to anticipate the viability of a solution before a large investment is made.
We provide data and evidence to support decisions with greater confidence.
We connect science and technology with the real challenges of the productive fabric.
We create safe experimentation environments, where it is possible to fail quickly and cheaply, learn and adjust before scaling up.
In short, we help transform those ‘no’s’ born of fear or uncertainty into ‘yes’s’ backed by knowledge and long-term vision. But in addition to technical support, we help with something equally important: building organisational trust in innovation.
“Technology centres helps on building organisational trust in innovation”
We help to create the necessary framework of trust in the innovation teams that already exist within the company, so that little by little the cultural change that the markets are demanding can be created. We create confidence in the innovation teams: in their judgement, in their knowledge of the business and in their ability to explore, test and build new solutions.
Because innovation should not require redesigning the organisational chart every time something new is proposed. It should not multiply approval levels or cause a cascade of unnecessary revisions. If something has to change in the structure of a company as a result of an innovation project, it should be to enter a new market, launch a new line of business, or scale a differential product that did not exist before.
Innovation processes are not born to complicate the structure of an organisation and much less to complicate the people who are part of the organisation. Innovation will prepare you for the future. And for this, the formula is clear: autonomy, method and expert support. Innovation is not a luxury or a risky bet. It is a strategic necessity to remain relevant. And like any strategy, it must be managed with rigour, with structure and with allies that provide real value. That is what we at the technology centres are here for: to walk alongside those who are leading change, to reduce uncertainty and to help turn good ideas into tangible results.
Innovate for you, innovate for me, innovate for all of us
In a geo-political and socio-economic environment such as ours, in which the industrial and business environment requires liquid managers with the ability to make decisions that adapt to the environment like water to the container that holds it, in which unlearning and relearning is worth more than the knowledge acquired so far, in which action plans must consider exploitation and exploration activities at the same level of importance. In this fast-paced world, the rest of agents in the innovation ecosystem -technology centres and research agents, public administrations, and society-, need to introduce routine actions that balance the objective risk-return ratio for each entity. Routine actions repeated by each one of them, reinforcing the role of each one of them. The role of each agent is a subject I dealt with in the post “Every stick hold its own”
We need routines that reduce the level of uncertainty in the environment in which we move, routines that allow us to make quick decisions with the addequate risk to the rentability we want to achieve, routines that respond to how, what, who, where and why of each value proposition.
These routines begin in the formation of universities, where the seed must be sown so that the routines begin to take root and the ecosystem allows it to grow in fertile soil and reproduce itself and leave a legacy.
These routines, although they may seem antonyms of innovation because of their repetitive and predictable nature, are in in fact the pillars that support the possibility of exploring the unknown. In a dynamic innovation ecosystem, routines are not simply inert habits; they are the scaffolding that allows us to experiment, learn and evolve with purpose. Like the musician who rehearses the same scales day after day to improvise masterfully in concert, routines in innovation are the disciplined rehearsal that precedes disruptive genius.
“Routines in innovation are the disciplined rehearsal that precedes disruptive genius”
In this context, routines should not be confused with rigidity. Rather, they are organisational patterns that provide stability without sacrificing the flexibility needed to adapt to change. For example, design thinking processes or agile methodologies, while structured, leave room for creativity and iteration. These practices demonstrate that innovation doesn´t emerge from absolute chaos, but from a balance between order and freedom.
In addition, routines play a crucial role in knowledge transfer. Universities and technology centres, especially, can structure training programmes for individuals and companies, as well as collaborative projects as the request of CIOS (Chief Innovation Officer) that turn exploration activity into practical and scalable aplications in a systematic way. In this sense, the routine becomes the mechanism that facilitates the cross-fertilisation of ideas and the market.
On the other hand, in a world that demands quick responses and effecetive solutions, routines help to reduce the friction between creativity and implementation. These routines not only clarify the steps needed to execute an idea by answering to how, what, who, where and why, but also align all actors involved, from companies and public administrations to researchers and technologists, in a common direction.
The key lies in designing routines that encourage continuous learning and systematic experimentation. This means unlearning what no longer works and developing new habits that incorporate diversity, technology and sustainability as core principles. In this way, the innovation ecosystem will be consistent with its purpose and will not only be able to adapt to the challenges of the present, but also to anticipate the opportunities of the future.
Ultimately, routines in innovation are not an end in themselves, but the means to generate sustainable impact. Routines reinforce the role of each agent, balance the risk-return trade-off and promote the establishment of a culture of collaboration and growth. These repetitive practices become the engine that drives transformational change. Because, paradoxically, true innovation is born of constancy: the constancy to do, to try, to fail and to try again.
Innovate for you, innovate for me, innovate for all of us.
In my previous post I commented how innovation ecosystems, if they aren´t well coordinated, can become real hotbeds of “de-technology”. This happens when the agents that make them up do not have clear roles or do not pursue a common objective. The lack of cohesion generates inconsistence and inefficiencies that, although sometimes they aren´t perceive directly, always end up affecting everyone.
It is therefore essential that research organisations, technology centres, public administrations, companies and society know that each one of us plays a role in the value chain of the technological innovation ecosystem and that the sole objective is to generateof wealth and prosperity in the regions through the exploitation of technologies.
Technological innovation that creates prosperity is not the result of science, technology or the market in isolation, but of a well-synchronised process in which each actor assumes its responsibility with conviction and commitment.
It is the role of the public administration to grease the innovation system by promoting innovative technological initiatives that support the fulfiment of the roles of each agent.
Research organisations, being leaders in basic science or research, the closest to technological disruption.They should be encouraged to achieve high levels of high impact sicentific publications and ensure long scientific careers in national public research organisations, initiated in universities with programmes focused on the demand of the research system.
Technology centres, as key agents in incremental innovation (applied research), also value the science of research organisation and work for its transfer. Their position must be consolidated with a key commitment, especially on the part of regional goverments, that reflecting their commitment to this transfer agent and bringing technological advances even closer to companies and society.
Companies, as leaders of innovation processes. Incentives shoukd be provided with more attractive tax rebates and deductions for their exploration policies, for the recruitment of university talent that stimulates the adoption of technological innovations in companies and allows the circle to be closed with the valorisation (use or exploitation) of the technology generated in the ecosystem itself.
Finally, the citizen should not be asked but rewarded with an economic and industrial policy centred on innovation policy, settled and long-term, with routes aligned with the general interests of growth and employment and a trade balance that imports talent and exports technology and not the other way around.
It is the role of the administration to grease the wheels and the role of all of us to generate habits of innovation in the ecosystem, repeating over and over again the role so that we are believed, because only in this way will we manage to grow and evolve in an orderly and sustainable way over time, building a future in which technology is not only a tool, but a driving force for collective progress.
Ultimately, every stick must hold its own in this complex ecosystem of technological innovation. If each agent plays its part and aligns itself with the common goal of generating prosperity and wealth through technology, we will not only avoid inefficiencies that are silently suffered, but also build a robust, competitive and sustainable system.
Innovate for you, innovate for me, innovate for all.
