Every leader I’ve worked with who insisted on starting from scratch shared the same belief: that ignoring what came before was the path to something truly new.
They were wrong. Expensively wrong.
Here’s what actually happens when an innovation team starts with nothing:
The earliest stages of innovation are where internal teams are weakest. Most companies don’t keep professional ideators on staff — they pull from operations, marketing, engineering. Hand those people a blank page and say “go invent” and the odds of surfacing something usable are slim.
Then there’s the IP problem. Starting from scratch dramatically increases the chance of reinventing something already patented. By the time legal flags it — and they usually do — the money is gone, the team is demoralized, and the options are an expensive redesign or outright abandonment.
I’ve watched this happen more than once.
The blank-sheet mindset persists because of how we’ve mythologized innovation. Steve Jobs. The lone genius. The bold vision from nothing. But that’s not how Post-it Notes happened. It’s not how the iPhone happened. Both required years of accumulated knowledge, prior experiments, and deliberate building on what already existed.
The better approach isn’t more creativity. It’s smarter curation.
Start with what’s already known: your company’s own failed projects (paid-for learning waiting to be reactivated), competitor products, supplier innovations, adjacent categories — and behind all of it, roughly 15.7 million patents across the world’s major IP offices, documenting virtually every significant human invention ever attempted.
The role of the innovation leader isn’t lone visionary. It’s intelligent curator.
Leaders F-Up innovation when they romanticize the blank sheet instead of recognizing it for what it is: an unnecessary tax on time, budget, and competitive advantage.
Does your organization have a system for mining past innovation work — or does every new project start from zero?
📖 How Leaders F-Up Innovation by Marc Drucker
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