Hi,

September has a particular rhythm.

People are back. Calendars fill up again. Projects restart. Workshops are scheduled. Decisions that quietly waited through summer suddenly become urgent again.

And in innovation, that often means attention quickly returns to projects.

• How do we get this idea moving?
• How do we improve this proposal?
• How do we make this consortium work?
• When is the next funding call?
• How much funding can we get?
• How do we get this innovation to market?

All important questions.

But there is another question we ask far less often:

What kind of system are all these projects operating in?

That distinction matters.

A strong innovation project can succeed even when the organisation around it is not particularly good at innovation.

You may have a great project leader. A committed team. Supportive management. The right partners at exactly the right moment.

And the project works.

But then the next one starts almost from scratch.

New methods. New discussions about priorities. New uncertainty about ownership. New debates about how ideas should be evaluated.

And there is another risk.

When attention stays focused on individual projects, it is easy to confuse activity with progress.

You can have plenty of innovation activity and still make very little strategic progress.

You can have a full innovation portfolio, several funding applications, busy project teams and plenty of movement, while still making very limited progress towards the strategic direction you actually want to pursue.

At that point, you may not have an innovation project problem at all.

You may have an innovation system problem.

For me, that is one of the important differences between managing innovation projects and building an Innovation Management System.

Projects help you create specific innovation outcomes.

An innovation system helps your organisation become better at creating those outcomes repeatedly, while making sure individual efforts contribute to a broader direction.

It creates clarity about how opportunities are identified, how ideas are selected, who makes decisions, how learning is captured and how innovation connects to strategy.

That does not mean turning innovation into bureaucracy.

Quite the opposite.

A good innovation system should reduce unnecessary friction and help innovation efforts add up to something bigger.

It connects choices, priorities and learning across projects, so teams are not only busy innovating, but are also moving towards meaningful strategic impact.

If every successful project still depends on exceptional people, heroic effort or a little bit of luck, there is probably an opportunity to strengthen the system around it.

I have written more about how an Innovation Management System can help create that clarity, without turning innovation into a paperwork exercise. If this distinction resonates, you can explore that perspective here.

And over the coming weeks, I will also explore the topic more practically in a new webinar series on innovation projects and innovation systems.

If this is a topic you are working on, stay in the loop for the upcoming sessions.

Warm regards,

Piet V.

P.S. A useful question for your next innovation meeting: are we solving something for this project, or are we improving the way we innovate every time?