How Do You Practice Innovation: 5 Effective Innovation Methods for Organizations
Innovation is a skill you build through consistent practice, similar to training for a marathon. Today, organizations that master how to practice innovation stay ahead, while others get left behind. Yet many treat innovation as a one-off event, resulting in stale ideas and missed opportunities.
The solution? Incorporating innovation methods and experimentation into daily organizational systems. This approach leads you toward faster growth and happier teams. In fact, McKinsey reports that innovation is one of the top three sources of competitive advantage for businesses1.
In this post, we will discuss five tried-and-tested innovation methods that can turn your team into innovation pros.
Innovation as skill development
Innovation isn’t something you can learn and implement overnight. It’s like playing an instrument, let’s say, a guitar. You need to practice the scales daily for weeks or months before putting on a show like Hendrix.
As Peter Drucker, a management theorist, puts it,
"Innovation is not a flash of genius. It is hard work, which should be organized as a regular activity in every unit of the company, and at every level of management2."
Reframing how to practice innovation as skill development changes everything. It supports “deliberate practice,” a concept from psychologist Anders Ericsson that involves intense, focused effort on challenging tasks beyond your skill level. These tasks are paired with immediate feedback loops, similar to targeted drills.
The goal is to turn innovation into a buildable skill through feedback-driven routines. Still, many organizations struggle in implementing innovation because they view it as an occasional brainstorm, not a daily habit.
5 effective innovation practices to try today
Innovation can be your organization’s superpower. However, the key is to start small and then scale up your innovation efforts. That’s the smartest way to make innovation methods stick in your organizational culture.
Here are five innovation methods that can help you get started with how to practice innovation:
1. Curiosity cultivation (30 min/day)
Motivate your workforce to spend 30 minutes a day reading outside their domains. This fuels curiosity. For example, a logistics pro can study biomimicry from nature docs, or a tech executive might read books on urban farming.
This breaks echo chambers and sparks wild connections. We all know how Google's famous "20% Time" policy led to the creation of Gmail, AdSense, and Google News3. Under this rule, the engineers could spend 20% of their workweek on personal projects, empowering them to think and build outside the box.
2. Problem finding (20 min/day)
Ask your customer success teams to spend 20 minutes daily finding problems. It could be done through customer interviews, support call reviews, or frontline chats. This eliminates many assumptions and gives you an overview of real customer pain.
You can ask open-ended questions, such as "What frustrates you most?" and then record their answers. Find the patterns to structure your innovation practices and approaches accordingly.
3. Ideation rituals
Make ideation a ritual with structured brainstorming, or "brainwriting," in which everyone first pens ideas silently to prevent groupthink. Schedule 15- weekly huddles: 5 minutes writing, 10 minutes discussing. Make sure to rotate facilitators to bring fresh energy and support creative breakthroughs.
Robert I. Sutton, a renowned organizational psychologist, writes in his book “Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation,”
“Weird ideas spark innovation because each helps companies do at least one of three things: (1) increase variance in available knowledge, (2) see old things in new ways, and (3) break from the past. These are the three basic organizing principles for innovative work4.”
4. Experimentation and small bets
Embrace experimentation through small bets and build-test-learn cycles. This innovation method will help your team prototype ideas in hours rather than weeks.
The key is to start small. Pick one idea each week and launch a simple minimum viable product (MVP), such as a landing page test. Track and measure results (clicks, users, or visits), and iterate on the landing page accordingly to drive innovation.
5. Reflection and learning
Wrap up your projects or a normal day at the workplace with “after-action reviews.” This includes reflecting on what worked and what flopped, and why.
Start by spending 10 minutes daily in close-outs, comprising three wins, one lesson, and one tweak. This reflection will turn your daily reps into an unstoppable innovation rhythm that compounds over time.
Structured innovation frameworks
Innovation frameworks help organizations implement innovative ideas across departments. Here are a few popular ones:
Design thinking: Put yourself in your customer's shoes first (empathize), then clearly define their problem. Next, brainstorm wild ideas, quickly build cheap prototypes, and test them with real users.
Lean startup method: Build the simplest version of your idea (called an MVP), test it with real customers right away, then decide to keep improving it or scrap it based on data.
Jobs to be done (JTBD): Figure out the "job" customers really want done, not just what product they buy. According to Theodore Levitt, a HBS marketing professor, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!5"
Blue ocean strategy: Stop fighting in crowded markets (red oceans) full of competition. Instead, create new market areas (blue oceans) where no one is competing.
How do you practice innovation: Final words
Innovation is a practiced skill. It is hard, disciplined work that pays off as a competitive edge, creative teams, and unscalable growth.
The key to mastering how to practice innovation lies in embracing diverse ideas and thinking outside the box. Start small, pick one practice a week, and practice it daily. Build your momentum and keep layering with more advanced innovation methods.
Work Cited
McKinsey. “How top performers use innovation to grow within and beyond the core.” 2025.
Beeshake. “Innovation and change management: 10 inspiring quotes.” 2025.
CNBC. “Google’s ’20% rule’ shows exactly how much time you should spend learning new skills—and why it works.” 2022.
Goodreads. “Weird Ideas That Work Quotes.”
Harvard Business School. What Customers Want from Your Products. 2006.