Most companies have an innovation lab. A place with colourful chairs, whiteboards, and a hashtag, where “the future emerges”. It is a nice picture, but it is wrong. Innovation does not happen in one place. It happens everywhere, or it does not happen at all.
Where good ideas actually come from
We see this in our own daily work. The most useful prototype of the past few weeks did not come out of a workshop. It came from the autobahn, between two customer meetings, dictated as a voice note into an agent. The second most useful one fell out as a side effect of a bug fix. The third was built by a working student in her onboarding week, because she had an idea and simply built it instead of saving it for the next innovation workshop.
The structural consequence
This observation translates directly into how we build. We deliberately do not sort newsroom content, prototypes, or product areas by “where they came from” or “which department they belong to”. An article about a new pairing logic in the showroom may be just as relevant for workshop IT. A tool we built for Mercedes might help an energy provider tomorrow. Departments are an organisational crutch, not a truth about content.
What friction has to do with innovation
The reason classical innovation labs deliver so little is not a lack of creativity. It is the friction outside the lab: someone with an idea who needs three weeks just to formally raise it has forgotten it before it ever entered the system. Someone who can document an idea in two minutes and see a prototype the next day has ten ideas a month. Lowering that friction is the real innovation work.
What this means for working together
When a company works with us, the expectation is rarely “build us an isolated AI pilot in department X”. The expectation is a way of working that assumes the next good idea can come from anywhere in the company, and that tooling and process exist to keep the path from idea to implementation as short as possible.
