As Apple shutters its plans for a self-driving car, investors (and certainly Apple leadership) are curious about where the company’s next big bet will come from. With the speed of innovation rapidly increasing across the market, companies like Apple can find themselves struggling to keep their innovation cupboards stocked.

But replenishing the company’s innovative energy is simply a matter of knowing where to look.

When companies find their innovation juice has run out, it’s often not due to a lack of ideas, but from a poor environment in which to bring them to reality.

It’s never been easy to be an innovation leader, but this moment feels like a particularly difficult time to keep up. As AI dominates the innovation landscape, even a company like Apple, which has given us one of history’s most successful consumer products in the iPhone, is now struggling to determine where its next major consumer project idea will come from.

The good news for Tim Cook and the rest of Apple leadership is that the first step to restarting the engine is simply admitting that the engine faces challenges. With the self-driving car project ending, the inevitable impacts are a clear sign that something isn’t quite as it should be.

Incubating Creativity

While lesser leaders may try to blame the environment and argue that there is limited growth potential to be had, it’s never the case that there is no more innovation to be achieved; if that were true, there’d be no Sam Altman and Open AI blowing minds and envisioning US$7 trillion chipmaking startups.

Instead, effective business leaders ask themselves: Do I have the right people in place? Are my teams structured correctly? Am I doing everything I can to give these ideas a chance to breathe and clearing out any parasitical forces that can drain the lifeblood out of them?

When companies find their innovation juice has run out, it’s often not due to a lack of ideas, but from a poor environment in which to bring them to reality. Bureaucracy can devour good ideas before they have a chance to soar. Eliminating bureaucratic layers can help ideas pop up in unexpected places, as can encouraging entrepreneurship among employees.

Companies need to be able to elevate and protect nascent ideas so that they have the opportunity to bloom.

The more that companies encourage and incent employees to act like entrepreneurs, the more they will, being bold and taking risks where they might otherwise opt for safety. Executives need to ensure they’re creating a culture of risk-taking among employees, reducing the number of safety filters that new ideas need to pass.

That can be done by creating more direct lines of communication straight to leadership, or revisiting the idea discard pile to consider projects that were deemed too risky when first proposed. Good ideas don’t cease to exist at a company – oftentimes they’re simply ignored because timing factors aren’t right.

Companies need to be able to elevate and protect nascent ideas so that they have the opportunity to bloom.

Creating time and resources for ideas to incubate can be key to replenishing creativity in a struggling company. Incubation provides protection, giving an idea space to grow and problem solve, while being insulated from the demands of corporate profit margins.

Taking Chances

A company with a strong incubation process will often choose one or two big bets for the future, ensuring funding through their development life cycles. Not all big bets pay off – Apple’s car didn’t. However, the advances that the team made on AI will certainly help to boost and unfurl the next big idea.

That was the case for Eli Lilly, which had an unprecedented 2023 on the back of its diabetes/weight loss drug, Mounjaro. The basis of the drug had been sitting in its labs for years, slowly making its way through development.

Drug companies, by necessity, have a culture that supports long-range research and testing, and as a result, Eli Lilly’s now got one of the most valuable drugs available.

It’s something top CEOs often have the confidence to do right. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg made a multibillion-dollar, multi-year bet on the metaverse, promoting the idea that his vision for the future can be made possible with time and resources. He seems comfortable playing the long game, much as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos oversaw almost a decade of losses before turning a profit.

The relentless pace of technological change and competitive pressures can create fear and stifle creativity and risk-taking, creating innovation scarcity where there shouldn’t be any.

Ironically, a culture that reviles failure is a leading cause of … failure. A failure-avoidant company won’t welcome ideas that overlap or compete with current business lines, often leading to catastrophic results.

Look no further than Blockbuster, which famously turned down the chance to buy Netflix because it was too worried about cannibalizing its own brick-and-mortar business to even consider an alternative in the marketplace.

Blockbuster’s innovation tank wasn’t empty, but its unwillingness to knock a few percentage points off its DVD rental business ultimately led to the demise of the entire company.

Ideas need time to flourish, and people need the freedom and resources to take chances. The relentless pace of technological change and competitive pressures can create fear and stifle creativity and risk-taking, creating innovation scarcity where there shouldn’t be any.

The solution lies in confidence, patience, good listening and observation skills. The good ideas are often already present. It’s just a matter of making sure the organization has the right environment and culture to allow them to thrive.