The most powerful tools leaders have are the voices from every level of their organization
Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of their current or former employer.
There’s always something to be said about the next big product launch or revolutionary bit of technology, but innovation isn’t just flashy tech and grand ideas. Improving how your organization works day-to-day to make a stronger, more stable company is also crucial. Few people understand that better than Matt Mueller, author of The Mindful Innovator and an advisor at Rethink Retail. Having helped clients like Disney, Target, Nestle, Pernod Ricard, and other giants refine their strategies, Mueller understands what it takes to make businesses run efficiently. And despite working with some of the world’s biggest companies, he has a refreshingly down-to-earth take on innovation: Focus on what your customers and employees tell you, and use that feedback to shape your company’s direction. Brightidea sat down with Mueller to talk shop in a recent interview.
Watch the full video below, or read on for a selection of key takeaways.
Key takeaways:
- Engage with front-line employees to determine business needs. Spend time where the work happens so strategy tackles real problems, not hypothetical ones.
- Elect an innovation champion. Companies need someone to helm innovation efforts, a deep thinker who can reflect on and be held accountable for initiatives.
- Solve real problems, drive change, and win acceptance to innovate. Use Mueller’s “three‑ingredient” test to keep innovations meaningful.
- Observe customer habits before reaching conclusions. User-level field data is a valuable way to identify the root cause of an issue.
- Co‑create with users and employees to make winning products. Invite employees and customers to build solutions with you; they already know what will work.
Break the “Ivory Tower” and Engage the Front Line
Modern leaders must bridge the gap between corporate strategy and frontline reality. Matt Mueller cautions against “white ivory tower syndrome,” where leaders push down initiatives without understanding daily operations. As a young deli manager, Mueller often thought, “What are they thinking? … Do they even know what it’s like to be in our shoes?” Later, as a corporate innovator, he caught himself making the same mistake.
“We misdiagnose the problems happening in our businesses, and our biases take over… So spend time with your employees, whether they’re on the front lines, whether they’re in different parts of your organization, or different teams within the corporate walls. But understand each point of view. What is their perspective? What are the true problems? And what do we need to fix to move the business forward? I think that’s really where leaders fall down when it comes to innovation.”
Mueller is right. Leaders can’t afford to ignore ideas from line-level employees. Amazon Prime began as an employee suggestion when engineer Charlie Ward submitted the concept to a digital suggestion box. The rest is history, with the service now boasting more than 200 million members worldwide, according to Statista. Billion-dollar ideas may be hiding in unsuspecting places, but leaders need to have open channels if they ever hope to discover them.
Find Someone to Champion Innovation
Businesses have to innovate to survive, but doing so requires a carefully calibrated approach. Mueller explains that the best way to pursue innovation is to assign the responsibility to an individual, a dedicated champion who can bring new projects to life. By coupling winning ideas with someone accountable for their success, it’s far easier to achieve real change.
“What I like to do after a hackathon is dissect all the concepts…Start to put every single component of the concept on a Post-it note…What are the nice to haves, what are the must haves… Your ideas become bigger and bigger— true winning ideas… If we have a person who can be the champion for that, and we say, ‘You are going to be our champion for innovation…We’re going to give you resources to do it. We’re going to give you a team.’ And you put that effort towards it, and you put metrics towards it, and that’s what you’re getting graded on for your job, that’s when you’re going to have real change happening in the organization.”
Champions of innovation shouldn’t be a foreign concept for anyone plugged into Silicon Valley’s culture. The most famous examples come from the big four (Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Google), with the likes of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai, but the role doesn’t need to be relegated to the CEO. What matters is putting someone in charge of innovation who is accountable for implementation, then giving them the resources to succeed.
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Innovation Comes From Three Key Components
Mueller emphasizes that flashy brainstorming and big-budget pilots won’t stick unless every initiative passes a simple but rigorous litmus test. In his experience, teams waste months tweaking prototypes that were exciting in the room yet disconnected from everyday pain points or lacked true sponsorship. To cut through the noise, he tells leaders to step back and measure each idea against three criteria that keep innovation grounded, purposeful, and adoptable:
“Truly, innovation is about three key components… The first one is that you need to be solving real problems… The second component is that there needs to be a change that’s going to improve… And the third thing… was that we need to get others to accept. Acceptance. We have to get others to accept that the change is going to solve that problem. And when we do those three things, that’s when we can have real innovation.”
Adobe’s “Kickbox” initiative is a strong example of how organizations can foster all three elements of successful innovation. Previously, Adobe would prototype 12 to 24 products per year, but in the first year of Kickbox, employees tested nearly 1,000 ideas for less than the cost of the old approach. By equipping every employee with a toolkit, funding, and a clear process, Adobe enabled people across the company to identify real problems they were close to. The structure encouraged purposeful experimentation, ensuring that changes were targeted improvements. And because ideas came from within teams and were shared openly, there was built-in buy-in: colleagues were more likely to accept and support innovations that originated from their peers.
Slow Down to Solve the Right Problem
In the rush to innovate, companies sometimes chase trends or quick fixes that don’t truly solve their core problems. Matt Mueller’s mantra is to slow down and be mindful in the innovation process. Mueller shared a story of a retailer with slumping bakery sales. The leadership’s initial hypothesis was that customers wanted healthier options, so they hurried to stock more low-calorie baked goods. But sales didn’t improve because the assumption was wrong. Mueller’s team took a step back and observed customers in stores. They discovered the real issue wasn’t health at all.
“We would walk over to the bakery department, and customers would kind of look at the case and then just walk on by… and put Oreos in their cart. I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’… And they’re like, ‘You know what? Nothing looks fresh over here… That’s [pointing to the cookies] not made here. [The bakery] looks like a cafeteria in a hospital.’… We knew we had to create crave… If we slow down to be a little bit more mindful about what our consumers want, we can then become more purposeful about the innovation that we need to place.”
Instead of loading the bakery with healthy items, the bakery focused on baking cookies during prime shopping hours to create a smell that was irresistible and would bring customers back.
It reminded Matt of a lesson he learned from the work of his mentor, Martin Lindstrom—who also wrote the foreword to his book—about the danger of chasing ideas that stray too far from what customers truly value. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, LEGO nearly went bankrupt from pursuing too many ideas outside its core business. The company “lost its way” by chasing every new trend without pausing to consider if these innovations aligned with what customers loved about LEGO. Realizing the mistake, the leadership refocused on LEGO’s core “brick” products and the creative experience customers wanted. They also started working more closely with the LEGO fan community to ensure new products hit the mark. LEGO never stopped innovating; they just innovated in the ways their customers wanted.
Co-Create with Your End Users and Employees to Uncover Answers
Sometimes the fastest way to innovate is to ask your customers and employees directly. Matt Mueller reminds us that those who use a product or work with a process daily often have the best ideas on how to improve it. “The answers are there, it’s just a matter of uncovering them,” he says, referring to insights that surface when you involve people outside your immediate strategy team.
“I kind of think about it as a triangle, three points. One is the company perspective or company goals: What are we trying to get done? Another is the employee perspective: What are they trying to get done? And the third is the customer perspective: What are they trying to get done? When we look at all three together, right in the center is where powerful innovation happens. That overlap is where you’ll uncover the solutions that truly move the business.”
Computer goliath Dell has used similar tactics in the past. In 2007, Dell launched IdeaStorm to gather product ideas directly from users. It paid off almost immediately. IdeaStorm users overwhelmingly voted for Dell to offer computers with Linux. Dell didn’t just take the suggestion under advisement, they collaborated with those users to make it happen. They polled the community on which Linux distribution and support features were most wanted, getting over 100,000 responses detailing what customers expected. From there, the product team took over. Where it normally took 12-18 months to launch a new product, Dell could turn around the new offering in just 4 months. It was a symphony of collaboration between leadership, customers, and employees.
Good Ideas Can Come From Anywhere
If you’d like to dig even deeper into the principles covered here, pick up Matt Mueller’s book The Mindful Innovator. In it, Mueller unpacks the same frontline-first mindset and “three-ingredient” framework with step-by-step exercises, real-world case studies, and reflection prompts you can use to jump-start your innovation playbook.
If you’re looking to energize your company’s innovation program, especially through hackathons or idea challenges, don’t hesitate to leverage solutions designed for that purpose. Brightidea’s hackathon platform can jump-start your efforts by providing a structured way to collect, manage, and act on ideas. Get a demo today.
