Human-Driven Innovation: Shaped by people. Multiplied by AI.
Human-Driven Innovation: Shaped by people. Multiplied by AI.
Everything digital is becoming a commodity.
Which leaves one thing left to compete on: what your people choose, ask and build together.
The starting point
Digital was supposed to be the advantage. It turned out to be the entry fee.
Why it happens
A best practice is someone else’s answer to someone else’s problem. Adopt enough of them and you arrive exactly where everyone else already is.
Not through incompetence. Through diligence. Every organization doing the sensible, benchmarked thing, all arriving at the same place at the same time.
And a large language model is trained on what has already been written. On what others have already done, in the past. Ask it for a strategy and it returns the most common one. AI is a best-practice machine. That is not a flaw. It is what it was built to be.
The way out is not a better practice. It is your own evidence. A small experiment that tells you something competitors do not know, because they did not run it.
I published a book called Best Practices Are Stupid in 2011, back when saying that in a boardroom got you a very particular kind of silence. The argument has not changed. The cost of getting it wrong has.
And no technology has ever stayed a differentiator.
Each was an edge while it was scarce, then became the price of entry. AI is arriving faster and more evenly than any of them, which makes its window the shortest yet.
What does not commoditize is judgment.
And judgment is not a personality trait. It is a set of decisions that can be made deliberately, and made better. Human-Driven Innovation is the discipline of making them.
What that actually means
They happen in order, and no tool makes them for you. Together they are Human-Driven Innovation. Most organizations are good at one and quietly avoid the other two.
Are we trying to be better at everything, and different at nothing?
Most organizations spread effort evenly and stand out nowhere. The discipline is choosing the few places where being genuinely better changes whether someone picks you, and accepting good enough everywhere else. That choice is a statement about who you intend to be, which is why it cannot be delegated to a consultant or a model.
The Innovation Targeting Matrix. Every activity sits at one of three levels, each calling for a different decision about AI. Automate at the top and you have outsourced the reason anyone picks you. Run the middle band well with AI and you free the attention, the budget and the best people for the top one. That is what multiplied by AI actually buys you.
Are we solving the problem we named, or the one we actually have?
Answers are now infinite, which makes the question the scarce resource. A well-framed one returns something you can act on. A lazy one returns a thousand fluent, confident, irrelevant responses, and the fluency makes the waste hard to see. Almost everyone skips this step, because the presenting problem always looks urgent enough to just start solving.
Five ways to reframe a problem: zero in on it, move up or down the level of abstraction, change what you are looking at, or change who is looking. Invisible Solutions sets out twenty-five of these lenses.
Is the person most likely to see it the one we keep routing around?
Expertise is an efficient way of arriving at the answer that worked last time. The answer usually sits with someone whose thinking is least like yours, which is exactly the colleague most teams route around. Getting genuinely different thinkers to argue and build together is the mechanism that produces work a competitor cannot copy, because they would have to reproduce the people.
And it does not hold at the level of individuals. A genuinely mixed team still defaults to the loudest voice, because what decides behaviour is what the organization values and what gets reviewed when everyone is in the room.
Behaviour does not change at the centre and stay changed. It has to reach the team, what the organization actually values, and what gets reviewed when people are in a room together. Miss the outer rings and it reverts by Thursday.
And this is where the experiment from earlier gets run. Different thinkers, arguing in the open, testing a small bet nobody else has bothered to test. That is how you end up holding evidence a competitor cannot look up.
You probably already know. These three will confirm it.
Ask your top twenty people, separately, what your organization is better at than anyone else. How many give the same answer?
If the answers scatter, you do not have focus. You have a slide about focus.
When did your team last change the question, rather than push harder on the answer?
If nobody can name a date, the question is not being owned by anyone.
Think of the person whose way of thinking is least like the rest of your leadership team. When were they last in the room when something was decided?
Most organizations route around that person without ever deciding to.
If those were uncomfortable to answer, that is the useful part. Very few leadership teams have said any of it out loud in the same room.
Stephen Shapiro founded and ran Accenture’s 20,000-person innovation practice before he ever spoke about innovation. He is a Senior Research Fellow with The Conference Board and the author of eight books. Human-Driven Innovation is the through-line of all of it.
Start the conversationStephen also makes this argument on stage. See the keynotes.