Why Most Businesses Get Innovation Wrong (And What It Actually Means)!

And I think that misunderstanding is quietly killing a lot of businesses.

I see it everywhere. A founder comes up with something they have never seen before and calls it ‘innovation’. A business launches a new product and includes the word “innovative” in its press release. A team run a brainstorming session and leave feeling like they have done the hard work.

They haven’t.

This is not a small mistake. It is an expensive one. And the businesses paying the highest price for it are often the ones with the most genuine potential, particularly across Africa, where the stakes for getting this right are enormous.

 The Innovation Myth Most Businesses Are Living

The word “innovation” has been stretched so far that it has lost most of its meaning.

In the last decade, it has become a badge. Something you put on a pitch deck to signal ambition, or on a job description to attract talent, or in a product announcement to generate press.

But a badge is not a strategy. And calling something innovative does not make it so.

The businesses that confuse the label for the thing end up in a dangerous cycle: they invest in newness rather than usefulness. They chase ideas rather than understanding. They build products that nobody asked for or, worse, products that copy what already exists somewhere else and assume the same result will follow.

It usually doesn’t.

What I Got Wrong Early in My Career

When I started my design career, I made the same mistake, just from a different angle.

I thought research was the path to innovation. If I gathered enough data, studied enough users, and read enough reports, the innovation would follow.

I was wrong.

Research is an input, not an output. And treating it as an end in itself is one of the most common traps designers and strategists fall into. You can spend months doing research and come out the other side with nothing but a very thorough description of a problem you still have not solved.

It took me years working with founders across the US, Canada, and the UK, designing for the UK government on some of its most significant national infrastructure; and training at the Royal College of Art to understand what I had been missing.

Understanding the problem is not the same as knowing how to change it.

So What Is Innovation, Actually?

Let me be direct about this, because I think a lot of the confusion comes from definitions that are either too broad or too abstract.

Innovation is not a new idea.

New ideas are everywhere. They are cheap, plentiful, and mostly irrelevant until someone does something with them.

Innovation is not research.

Research tells you what is. Innovation requires a decision about what should be different — and the courage to act on it.

Innovation is not even a new product.

A new product is just a new product. It only becomes an innovation when it changes something meaningful for the people using it.

Here is what innovation actually is:

Innovation is what happens when you deeply understand a real problem and then change something in a way that creates genuine value for the person experiencing it.

That is it. The rest is decoration.

The idea is just the beginning. The research is just the input. The product is just the output. The innovation lives in the gap — between understanding and action, between what you have observed and what you decide to do differently because of it.

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  The Gap Where Innovation Actually Lives

That gap is where most businesses give up without realising it.

They do the research. They have the idea. They build the product. But they never make the hard decision at the centre of it all: what specifically are we changing, for whom, and why will it work better for their real life than what already exists?

That decision requires you to sit with discomfort. To resist the urge to move fast. To accept that a brainstorm is not a strategy and that feeling creative is not the same as solving something.

The businesses that get this right the ones that build things that genuinely last – are the ones who treat the gap not as an obstacle but as the work itself.

 

Why African Businesses Have the Biggest Innovation Opportunity Right Now

This is where it gets important for me personally.

I work across the Africa-West corridor, helping African founders enter Western markets and Western businesses enter Africa without the wrong assumptions. And what I see consistently on the African side is a tension that, if resolved, becomes one of the greatest competitive advantages available anywhere in the world right now.

The tension is this: African founders are sitting on deep, contextual understanding of problems that most of the world has not even identified yet. Problems around infrastructure, financial access, trust, mobility, community, and economic participation that require genuinely new approaches, not transplanted solutions from Silicon Valley or London.

But too many of them are looking outward for answers. Copying what worked in San Francisco. Building for the Western investor pitch rather than the local user reality. Outsourcing their innovation to a context that does not share their constraints.

That is the wrong direction.

When you learn to innovate from a deep understanding of your own context — when you build from the inside out — you create something nobody else can replicate. Not a Western competitor. Not another African startup that copied a Western model. Nobody.

Because your insight is yours. It came from being in the room, in the market, in reality.

That is not just innovation. That is an unfair advantage.

What This Means for How You Build

Whether you are a founder in Lagos or a product team in London, the principle is the same.

Do not start with the idea. Start with the person. Understand their reality with enough specificity that the solution becomes almost obvious. Then make the decision, the hard, clear, irreversible one about

What you are going to change and why.

That is the work. Not the brainstorm. Not the press release. Not the product launch.

The innovation is in the decision.

And the businesses that learn to make that decision well rooted in genuine understanding, not borrowed assumptions, are the ones that build something worth building.