In a landscape dominated by immediate tasks, innovation is often sidelined. Balancing today's demands with tomorrow's vision requires intentional thinking time—not working harder, but smarter —with room for contemplation so you're moving forward, not just active.
What to Do During Dedicated Think Time
1. Reassess mission, vision, and values. Periodically question how they continue — or fail — to meet customer needs, and where innovation could strengthen alignment.
2. Catalog problems. What are the enduring problems that never seem to get solved? If you mapped out each function's top three pain points, where would patterns and themes emerge? This can guide where innovation is most needed.
3. Learn. What's your process for taking in new ideas — reading, podcasts, research? Organizational researcher Bob Sutton has argued generalist-run companies out-innovate specialist-run ones; Mary Barra held roles across manufacturing, HR, and product development before becoming GM's CEO. David Epstein's Range found the same pattern in athletes who sampled widely before specializing. New in 2026: AI tools like Claude can dramatically compress the research phase of learning, freeing up more time for the reflection only a human can do.
4. Look outside your field. This approach can spark ideas for new products, processes, and services. The solution to an accounting problem could be found in taking up jazz guitar. A solution to a coding puzzle could be in a food documentary on Netflix. Engineering and birdwatching may have more in common than you know. Research shows innovation can come from just about anywhere.
5. Look inside your company. Talk to your customers, lead users, suppliers, business partners, and R&D labs. Leaders should wander around, ask questions, and then connect the dots of disparate information in valuable and essential ways. Only by forcing yourself to break free from pre-existing views can you re-categorize information and move beyond habitual thinking patterns. Without this, you will gravitate toward the routine.
6. Take on stretch projects at least once a quarter or year to accelerate your own learning curve.
7. Upgrade capabilities continuously — people can't deliver on what they don't know how to do.
8. Embrace downtime. When you do nothing, your mind wanders, thinks, and innovates. Walking, biking, playing music, meditating, and being in nature are all helpful. Albert Einstein reportedly said that he did nothing 99% of the time, and ideas came to him. Rest is often the source of great ideas, not their enemy.
Team Strategies for Innovation
1. Perspective-taking. Spend time talking to innovation teams and customers. Bracken Darrell, CEO of Logitech, spends 40-60% of his time on innovation in conversation with others because he believes this aspect can’t be outsourced. As a team, it’s helpful to discuss: Who are all the stakeholders involved? What are their perspectives now? What were their perspectives previously? What prompted the shift? What could their perspectives be in the future? Why would it be different? You can invite customers, suppliers, people from other departments, and other outsiders to your meetings to offer suggestions for improving your department.
2. Schedule white space. You run on fumes when you go from meeting to meeting or activity to activity. When your team makes it the norm to build in an empty block or buffer between meetings, or a free morning to do nothing, ideas will visit you, and you'll have time to capture and play with them. If you don't have white space, or your teammates don't respect it, ideas will go elsewhere.
3. Incentivize innovation. When top leadership tells middle management to innovate but then incentivizes and rewards them based on revenue from current products, it sends a mixed message. You can tie innovation to the career framework. If team members participate in innovation and drive bold alternative solutions, recognize it.
4. Allocate deep work time. Set aside time to focus, think deeply about one thing or survey the landscape, let your thoughts drift, and see what comes up. Regular, undisturbed intervals can spark creativity and lead to substantial breakthroughs.
4A. Reflection time. A space to regularly ask: what’s working, what’s not, what should we do differently, and what have we never tried before?
4B. Vision work. What is the long-term vision for your company? What are some ideas that change the course of history, like putting a man on the moon or what Safi Bacall would call a Loonshot.
· Practice idealization, a proven method of peak performance thinking. Asking questions such as, if you could wave a magic wand and make your business different today, what would it look like, and what would be the first step to get to where you have to go.
· What one great thing would you want to dream if you knew you could not fail?
4C. Goal setting. What are the three most important goals for business, culture, growth, and leadership for next year, and the following three? It may change, but engaging in the work can spark ideas.
5. Allocate meeting time for innovation. Devote a percentage of time in every staff meeting, or every other meeting, to listening to outside ideas for improving processes and tech and developing new products and services.
5A. Bring diverse groups together from the beginning. Safi Bacall talks about the importance of bringing two types of people together in the organization: the creators/artists who come up with new ideas and work on the product, and the soldiers who execute the product. A skilled facilitator is essential because artists are prone to take risks, and it can sting when they share ideas they've poured their soul into. Soldiers are wired to take little risks. Steve Jobs had Johnny Ive, a legendary product guy/artist, and Tim Cook, head of inventory/soldier, balance each other out. When Jobs reflected on his life, he said the most innovative thing he did was design his organization. People bring their own mental models and frameworks; with that diversity, great ideas emerge when you have an effective process.
6. Dedicate innovation days, weeks, or teams.
6A. Dedicated Innovation Days – Google’s 20% time lets people spend 20% of their work hours, or one day a week, working on projects of their choice unrelated to their regular job responsibilities. This freedom allows employees to explore their passions, experiment with new ideas, and collaborate with colleagues across the organization. This innovation time has led to the company’s most successful products: Gmail, Google News, and Google Maps.
6B. Hack Week – Time for creatives to get together, iterate, and plan. Spotify’s beloved Discover Weekly playlist originated as a Hack Week idea, as did the ability to exclude select playlists from your taste profile.
6C. Innovation Labs– Teams directly responsible for innovation. Google X’s lab has been responsible for Google Glass, Google driverless cars, and many more. Amazon Lab126 focused on the reinvention of the book and, as a result, produced the Kindle, Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Fire Stick TV
7. Use sentence stems with your team. You can have innovation meetings and do exercises such as sentence stems to spur thinking. For example:
· Could our product be put to a different use?
· Could we adapt or copy what somebody else is doing to improve the product? Taking an innovation from one industry and applying it to another is helpful. Henry Ford got the idea for the production line by watching a meat-processing plant.
· Could we modify, change, or repackage our idea? Walt Disney saw that fairs were trashy and wanted to create a clean amusement park.
· Can we magnify the product by making it bigger or shinier?
· Could we minimize it, making it shorter or subtracting from it?
· How about a substitute? Can we use a different manufacturer, material, or advertising approach?
· Can we make our products more attractive and sellable?
· Can we reverse our thinking and take an opposite approach to what we are doing?
· Can we combine the product with something else, and can we bundle it to have a higher offering? Can we find value in a byproduct?
· How can we provide a superior buying experience to the competitor? Let’s identify three ways that can make our product more attractive.
Making time for innovation isn't a luxury; it's a necessity for growth. By institutionalizing practices that foster reflective thinking and creative exploration, we pave the way for meaningful innovations that can redefine the market landscape.
Quote of the day. “Think left and think right, think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!” -Dr. Seuss
Reflection Question. What are your reflection practices connected to innovation? Comment and share below; we would love to hear from you.
As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to cultivate a culture of innovation, contact me to explore this topic further.
What time do you spend on innovation?