In a world where companies are under intense pressure to deliver topline growth, “innovation” is now the word on every business leader’s lips. After all, innovation helps to recruit new customers and get existing customers to buy more and spend more.
Yet many large corporations still struggle to manage innovation as a successful, repeatable growth engine. Inside these companies, innovating often feels slow, complex and risky. Meanwhile, smaller, more agile players are moving fast, grabbing market share and reshaping industries overnight.
For Tom Pullen, CEO of Innovinco®, this gap is not a creativity or people problem – it’s a strategy and systems problem. A problem he solves in his new book INNOVATOR: 10 simple steps to innovate with speed, scale and confidence (Practical Inspiration Publishing).
“Large companies don’t lack ideas or strong talent,” says Pullen. “They lack a repeatable innovation system that’s fully connected to strategy.”
The data reinforces this point. According to BCG’s 2024 Innovation Systems Need a Reboot report, just 12% of company executives report a strong link between strategy and innovation – despite the fact that those that do achieve a 74% higher share of revenue from new products.
After 18 years driving growth inside major corporations including Boots, Mars and Danone, where he became Global Innovation Director – and nearly a decade working with market-leading brands globally – Pullen observed a consistent pattern: whilst innovation governance structures exist, project leaders and teams often lack a practical, end-to-end system to turn strategy into commercially successful, customer-winning products and services.
The result? Projects proceed slowly and stall, companies default to small and safe bets, risk aversion increases, and growth underdelivers versus expectations.
The INNOVATOR Way® addresses this. Born from 15 years of hands-on work with over 30 of the world’s leading corporations, and now trusted by business leaders in over 40 countries, it provides a robust, repeatable roadmap that transforms business strategy into innovation excellence.
Rather than treating innovation as isolated projects or breakthrough moments, the INNOVATOR Way® reframes it as a set of 10 simple steps, driven by five core leadership behaviours, all of which can be deployed effectively at scale within an organisation.
“Innovation becomes predictable when it becomes systemic,” Pullen explains. “When you embed the right actions, behaviours and evidence at the right moments, innovation becomes faster, simpler and significantly less risky.”
By integrating both innovation process steps and often overlooked human behavioural factors – which frequently derail projects – the INNOVATOR Way® increases the likelihood that innovation efforts translate into measurable commercial results.
The INNOVATOR Way® – tested across industries as diverse as automotive, construction, food, healthcare, luxury and logistics – is now publicly available for the first time in Pullen’s new book: INNOVATOR.
INNOVATOR’s combination of a step-by-step approach, power questions, real-world examples and immediately applicable tools and techniques enables individuals, whatever their role, to move from intent to action, reduce risk, create value and bring innovative new solutions into reality.
INNOVATOR tackles head-on the real barriers that consistently hold people and companies back – risk aversion, lack of alignment, weak customer insight and strategic disconnect – replacing them with a practical, human-centred method specifically designed for the realities of large organisations.
In today’s era of economic pressure, accelerating technology and rising complexity, Pullen argues that innovation can no longer remain inconsistent or personality-driven. The difference between innovation ambition and innovation performance, he believes, is almost always systemic.
“Growth today is constrained less by opportunity and more by execution discipline,” he says. “Innovation can no longer remain fragmented; it must now be treated as a structured growth system – learned, embedded and scaled across large organisations. INNOVATOR provides leaders and teams with a practical blueprint to do exactly that.”
