An innovation operating model is built for a particular moment: a certain scope, a certain mandate, a certain kind of bet.

When the business changes, the model has to change with it. This week's three stories are about companies that had to do exactly that.

At Synthomer, the divisions took over the full innovation pipeline, and the central team had to work out a new role from scratch. At ILUNION Hotels, every time innovation spread further into the business, the operating model broke and had to be rebuilt. At Experian, a light-touch setup meant to speed up disruptive bets ended up creating overhead of its own.

How well does your current model fit your business context? And if you can tell it's nearing its expiry date, are you already designing the next version?

Curious to hear from you.

Hans

What's the Center For When the Business Owns Innovation?

If you run a central innovation team, sooner or later someone asks what it's for, usually once the business units start owning more of innovation themselves. The answer has to be something they can't do just as well on their own.

When Synthomer handed its three divisions the full innovation process, long-term bets included, the central team was left with no projects, no agenda, and little of the divisions' trust. David Ring, who runs group innovation, heard it at every level. His own peers told him not to "take control of my pipeline."

His first idea for what the center could add, a small team going out to early-adopter customers, was turned down. But the way he brought it to the divisions changed the mood in the room.

So when the board asked him what exactly his team was going to do, he worked out the answer with the same peers who had once told him to stay out. The result: three jobs for the center, one shared process, and a rule any central innovation team can test itself against.

The Innovation Function That Keeps Outgrowing Itself

If your innovation team delivers, it usually gets more scope as a reward. At ILUNION Hotels, each time that happened, the way innovation was organized stopped working and had to be rebuilt.

ILUNION Hotels operates under a mandate most companies never face: integrate people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups into every level of the business. Today, 37% of its workforce has a disability. That turned every operational problem, from room cleaning to workload distribution, into an innovation problem.

Over 12 years, the chain has run innovation through three operating models. Each one delivered, from a housekeeping system that cut daily assignment time by 85% to a fully accessible hotel room that doesn't look like one. And each one hit a limit its structure couldn't get past.

The third model is now approaching its own limit, and Carlos Bello, who leads innovation there, can already see what it is.

10 Teams, 10 AI Stacks: Experian's Case for Setting Structure Upfront

If your last innovation program drowned in reporting, the obvious fix is to strip the governance out. Experian tried that with its disruptive bets, and the overhead turned up somewhere else.

Experian's last innovation approach got buried in reporting. So when its CEO and board backed ten tiger teams to find bets that could disrupt the company's own business, it went the other way: minimal reporting, open formats, informal check-ins with the CEO.

It didn't make things faster. The ten teams built ten separate AI stacks. They showed up to their informal CEO reviews with 40-page decks, because there's nothing more formal than an informal CEO review. And when the eight-week sprint finished on time, they waited six weeks for a funding decision.

Mike Charyk, a founding member of Experian's global innovation team, shares the four pieces of structure he'd now put in place before the work starts.

How many times have you redesigned the setup/structure of your group, or your (program's) operating model?

What’s happening @ Novum

Earlier this week we had one of the monthly topical co-working sessions. One member came in wanting to build foresight into the annual strategic planning process, to get strategic innovation a clear mandate in a business that has pulled back to the core. The advice from the session: you won't win that argument with better two-pagers. Start close to the core, where leaders are already held accountable, and map the opportunities inside each business unit's lane, in the gaps between lanes, and just outside them. At one company that tried this, asking six executives where innovation should focus produced eight different answers, and mapping the options this way is what made the discussion productive. The member will now build that map for their own business and test it with leadership.

What actually drives innovative behaviour – and how can innovation managers build a stronger culture from where they are? On Thursday Oct 22nd, we’ll welcome Dagmar Boettger for an interactive workshop diving into the ME–WE–US framework: three levels that shape innovative behaviour, from individual belief and team dynamics to leadership sponsorship and resources. We’ll explore how psychological safety, empowerment, and your own leadership signals can strengthen team dynamics, produce visible results, and ultimately create the evidence needed for broader leadership conversations.

Keen to bring your challenge to a group of peers, or join discussions about innovation culture and leadership support? Join the Novum Society - check this page for more info.

Next week, we’ll share how members are using “the innovator’s toolkit” to support their organizations making the right choices when implementing AI. No surprise, our skillset comes handy here too, as we’ll see.