Melissa Dinwiddie

Click to watch (06:46) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Call That Changes Everything You know the moment. A leader above you — maybe the CEO, maybe the board — decides it's time. "We need to be more innovative. We need a culture where people take risks, generate ideas, move faster." And somehow, you're the person who gets the mandate. Maybe it comes with a budget. Maybe it comes with a timeline. Maybe it comes with exactly zero additional support, a team...

Click to watch (13:17) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Buzzer Goes Off I’m going to take you back to 2014 or so. I'm standing in a line at my first improv performance class, waiting for my turn, watching everyone ahead of me step up to do a scene with a partner. Simple enough — except for one rule: you cannot use the letter S. What?! As I got closer to the front, my heart rate climbed. My mouth went dry. I rehearsed every possible sentence opener in my head,...

Click to watch (12:05) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Today I want to talk about something that is quietly killing innovation on your team. It's not a lack of ideas. It's not the wrong tools or the wrong people. It's the unspoken rule that everything has to be good before anyone sees it. Why Your Next Innovation Should Be Terrible (On Purpose) Here's what I know about analytical, high-performing teams: they don't lack ideas. They lack permission to have bad ones....

Click to watch (11:26) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Here's a common reaction I get when I tell leaders the first step of my innovation framework is called "Play Hard": An almost imperceptible pause. A polite smile. And behind the eyes: Oh no. She's going to make us do trust falls. I get it. The word "play" has been weaponized by well-meaning consultants for decades. It has come to mean: vaguely fun, probably frivolous, nothing that will matter on Monday...

Click to watch (11:14) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Your team isn't short on ideas. They're short on safety. And the difference between those two diagnoses determines whether your innovation initiative becomes a real culture shift — or just another offsite people talk about once and forget by February. The Job I Still Think About When I was just out of high school, I got a job at a trendy housewares store in a shopping center. My manager was impatient — the...

Click to watch (13:04) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Here's something that might reframe how you think about your entire organization's capacity for innovation: The people most likely to drive real breakthroughs aren't the ones in your "creative" departments. They're in your engineering teams. Your data science orgs. Your project management offices. And something you're probably doing right now is making sure they never find out. The Myth That's Costing You...

Click to watch (08:12) or scroll down to read Hey there, innovation champions! Two weeks. Two virtual sessions. Two teams of researchers — analytical, a little introverted, equally uncertain about what they'd signed up for. On paper, identical. In practice, worlds apart. Two Sessions, Two Worlds Both sessions opened the same way: participants jotted down three personal strengths, then doodled a "future forecast" — themselves five years from now, using those strengths to be absolutely crushing...

Click to watch (08:12) or scroll down to read Hey there, innovation champions! Two weeks. Two virtual sessions. Two teams of researchers — analytical, a little introverted, equally uncertain about what they'd signed up for. On paper, identical. In practice, worlds apart. Two Sessions, Two Worlds Both sessions opened the same way: participants jotted down three personal strengths, then doodled a "future forecast" — themselves five years from now, using those strengths to be absolutely crushing...

Hey there, innovation champions! Most organizations say the right things about innovation. They write it into their values. They announce it in all-hands meetings. They fund initiatives, run workshops, and measure engagement scores. And then they wonder why nothing sticks. The Party Nobody Showed Up To I've been thinking a lot lately about a pattern I keep noticing — in conversations with HR leaders, in research calls with team managers, in the questions that come up after my sessions. It...