How Small Ideas Gain Momentum: The Quiet Engine of Innovation

For over a decade, as an Innovation keynote Speaker in india I have carried the subject of creativity and innovation into the conference rooms of Fortune 500 companies and Indian conglomerates alike — often speaking to R&D teams, manufacturing floors, engineering divisions, and management groups who each define innovation a little differently. And in every one of those rooms, I have noticed the same misconception waiting at the door: people believe innovation is a single, dramatic event. A breakthrough. A disruption. A product launch that changes everything overnight. What I have learned instead, session after session, client after client, is that innovation is rarely an event. It is a process — one with a beginning but no real end.

That distinction matters more than most leaders realise, and it is the first thing I try to unlearn in every innovation workshop I run.

The Idea Wall That Nobody Believed In

A few years ago, I was engaged by a large manufacturing conglomerate in India to help them build what they called an ‘innovation culture.’ Leadership wanted the next big disruptive idea. What we actually built, over the course of several months, was an idea wall in the cafeteria, a weekly ‘zero gravity hour’ where any employee could pitch a half-formed thought without fear of judgement, and an internal ‘Idea Olympics’ where departments competed to solve small, unglamorous problems — a packaging defect here, a delay in a supply chain there.

The plant head was sceptical at first. He told me, quite bluntly, that he didn’t need a cafeteria wall, he needed a breakthrough. Eighteen months later, that same wall had generated an idea from a shop-floor supervisor — a small tweak in how raw material was staged before assembly — that ended up reducing changeover time by a significant margin across three plants. Nobody would have called it a disruptive innovation on the day it was pinned to that wall. But its ripple effect, once implemented and refined by other teams who added to it, became one of the most valuable operational improvements the company made that year.

This is the domino effect I try to help every client see. Innovation, at its most practical, is the act of making a customer’s experience — internal or external — a little better, faster, cheaper, or friendlier than it was yesterday. Clayton Christensen, whose work on disruptive innovation reshaped how the corporate world thinks about this subject, made a related point in his research: most disruption does not begin as a superior product competing head-on with incumbents, it begins as a modest, almost overlooked improvement that gradually climbs upmarket. Small ideas, compounding.

The Discipline of ‘Plussing’

One concept I introduce in nearly every innovation session I facilitate comes from an unlikely source — the animation studio Pixar. Their internal practice, often called ‘plussing,’ is deceptively simple: when someone shares an idea, instead of immediately critiquing or dismissing it, the group’s job is to add to it. Not ‘here’s what’s wrong with this,’ but ‘here’s what I would add to make this even better.’ Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, wrote extensively about this culture in his book Creativity, Inc., describing how even fully-formed films at Pixar go through hundreds of rounds of collective refinement before release, with every department contributing something the original idea did not have.

I once ran a version of this exercise with a technology team at an Indian IT services company in Bengaluru. An engineer proposed a minor internal tool to automate a repetitive reporting task. In a traditional review meeting, it might have been shelved as ‘not strategic enough.’ Instead, using the plussing method, three other teams added their own use cases to it over the following weeks. Within six months, that small utility had become a cross-functional platform used by over a dozen teams, entirely because nobody was allowed to simply say no without first trying to build on it.

This is echoed in Harvard Business Review’s extensive research on innovation culture, which has repeatedly found that organisations with the highest rates of successful innovation are not necessarily the ones generating the most radical ideas, but the ones with the strongest internal systems for capturing, refining, and iterating on modest ones. Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, calls this the ‘adjacent possible’ — the idea that breakthroughs rarely arrive fully formed, but emerge from the recombination of smaller, existing ideas once the right conditions and collaborators are in place.

Why Saying No Requires an Explanation

One of the most striking cultural practices I share in almost every keynote is Amazon’s internal discipline around rejecting employee ideas. According to reporting on Amazon’s internal practices, when a manager decides not to pursue an idea an employee has brought forward, that manager is expected to explain the reasoning in writing back to the employee — not simply dismiss it in a hallway conversation. It is a small structural choice, but it sends an enormous cultural signal: ideas are taken seriously enough to deserve a real answer, even when that answer is no.

I tried to replicate a lighter version of this practice with a client in the BFSI sector during a culture transformation engagement. We asked every manager to respond to submitted employee ideas within two weeks, with either a green light, a request for more information, or a short written reason for declining. Within a year, the volume of ideas submitted through their internal innovation portal had grown considerably — not because the ideas were all being approved, but because employees trusted that their submissions were actually being read. Forbes has covered similar findings in its coverage of corporate innovation programmes, noting that one of the most common reasons employee-driven innovation initiatives quietly die is not a lack of ideas, but a lack of visible follow-through from leadership on ideas that were submitted.

Innovation Is Everyone’s Job, Not a Department’s

In one of my early engagements with a large FMCG company, I was told, almost apologetically, that innovation ‘belonged’ to the R&D department, and my session should really be reserved for them. I pushed back gently. Some of the most useful improvements I have seen in my career came not from formal R&D labs, but from a warehouse supervisor rethinking a loading sequence, or a customer service executive noticing a pattern in complaints that nobody upstream had connected.

This mirrors what innovation consultant Tom Kelley of IDEO has long argued — that the most innovative organisations treat every employee as a potential source of insight, because the people closest to a customer’s frustration or a process’s inefficiency are often the ones best positioned to fix it.

Fortune magazine’s coverage of high-performing companies has repeatedly highlighted a similar theme: organisations that outperform their peers over long periods tend to have cultures where continuous, incremental improvement is embedded at every level, not confined to an innovation lab or a single quarter’s initiative.

The Culture That Eats Innovation for Breakfast

I often tell audiences, borrowing loosely from the famous management idea that culture eats strategy for breakfast, that the same is true for innovation. You can install an idea box, run a hackathon, or announce an innovation quarter — but if the underlying culture punishes failure, discourages speaking up, or lets good ideas die quietly in a manager’s inbox, none of it will take root. Building a genuine innovation culture is slower and less glamorous than most leadership teams expect, but it compounds in exactly the way a small idea, taken seriously and allowed to gather contributors, eventually becomes something the entire organisation depends on.

This is the work I care most about in my keynotes, workshops, and strategic interventions — not chasing the next big disruptive idea, but helping organisations build the patient, structural habits that let small ideas find their way to execution. Because in every case I have witnessed up close, the big ideas an organisation eventually becomes known for started somewhere small, unnoticed, and almost dismissed — until someone decided to listen.