Blog - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant -

What Happened When a Room Full of HR Professionals Played With AI

Hey there, innovation champions! Most HR leaders I talk to have a complicated relationship with AI right now. They know they’re supposed to embrace it. They’ve read the articles, sat through the webinars, maybe even experimented with a few tools. But underneath the professional curiosity, there’s often a quieter anxiety: What if using AI more means losing what […]

Innovation Isn’t a Creativity Problem. It’s a Permission Problem.

Your team doesn’t need a creativity transplant. They need different conditions. Hey there, innovation champions! The Question That Changes Everything Here’s a pattern I’ve watched play out in organization after organization, across industries, team sizes, and job functions. A leader decides it’s time to “get more creative.” They send their team to a workshop. Maybe they bring in […]

Melissa Dinwiddie, a curly-haired woman wearing red glasses and a rust-colored top, smiles broadly while holding up her book Innovation at Work: 52 Micro-Experiments for Brave Leaders Who Want to Unstick Teams, Spark Ideas, and Build What's Next. Bold orange and white text beside her reads "Why Your Team Needs the Paperback (The Tech Argument for Old-School Codex Technology)." The background features an abstract paint splatter in red, hot pink, deep blue, and golden yellow against white.

Why Your Team Needs the Paperback (The Tech Argument for Old-School Codex Technology)

Hey there, innovation champions! Here’s something I didn’t expect to say as someone who embraced ebooks years ago: I genuinely believe the physical version of Innovation at Work will do more for your team than the Kindle version ever could. And I have receipts. The Great Ebook Experiment That Didn’t Go as Planned A few years ago, […]

The Experiment I Almost Didn’t Run (And What It Taught Me About Team Innovation)

Hey there, innovation champions! Your team doesn’t need more alignment meetings. They need one small experiment and permission to start before they’re ready. Here’s how I know. The Competition I Almost Didn’t Enter On Saturday, I stood onstage in a TV studio and told a five-minute story to a room full of judges and fellow speakers. I placed […]

What to Do When the Experiment Doesn’t Work

Hey there, innovation champions! Last week I shared that Innovation at Work is live — and I asked you to pick one experiment, run it, and tell me what happened. A few of you have already reached out. (Thank you. Seriously. I read every response.) But I also heard a version of this: “I want to try one, […]

The Experiment Is Live!

Hey there, innovation champions! A few weeks ago, I wrote about why I was publishing a book of experiments before every single one had been tested with every possible team. The short version: because that’s how innovation actually works. You don’t wait for perfect conditions. You run the experiment and see what happens. Well, the experiment is officially […]

The Crappy First Draft Showcase

Hey there, innovation champions! I want to tell you how I actually want you to use my new book. But first, a confession. A Canvas That Sat in Plastic Wrap for Years Back when I was making my living as a professional artist, I spent close to a decade almost never making art for myself. I was trapped […]

This Book Is an Experiment. And That’s Exactly the Point.

Hey there, innovation champions! Here’s the thing nobody tells you about innovation initiatives: most of them don’t fail because the idea was bad. They fail because everyone expected them to be perfect before they started. Sound familiar? I’ve been inside enough tech teams (heck, teams in general!) to know that this is one of the quietest innovation killers […]

When Creativity Feels Impossible (And Why We Do It Anyway)

Hey there, innovation champions! These are trying times. I wrote the other day on LinkedIn about the cognitive dissonance of logging in to talk about business-as-usual while communities are being terrorized and traumatized by an armed force of untrained, violent men, and citizens are being executed in the streets while exercising their Constitutional rights. Writing this newsletter feels […]

The Innovation Cycle No One Talks about

Hey there, innovation champions! Most leaders can tell you when innovation has stalled. What they struggle to see is when it’s about to stall—when the very systems that created breakthrough thinking have quietly calcified into comfortable routines that feel productive but have stopped producing anything new. I discovered this pattern not in a boardroom, but in my […]

The Most Expensive Innovation Problem Nobody Talks About

Hey there, innovation champions! Most innovation efforts don’t fail because teams lack ideas. They fail because smart, capable people are waiting for permission to be perfect—and by the time they feel ready, the moment has passed. I’ve watched this pattern stall product launches, kill momentum after conferences, and quietly drain the energy out of teams that leaders genuinely […]

Why Your Q1 Innovation Initiative Will Fail by February (And the 52-Week Alternative That Actually Sticks)

Hey there, innovation champions! Before I head to Alabama and Arizona to spend the holidays with family, I wanted to share something that could save your Q1 innovation initiative before it even launches. Because here’s the pattern I see every single year: In January, leaders roll out ambitious innovation programs. By February, they’ve quietly fizzled out. By March, […]

The 15-Minute Meeting Opener That Unlocks Creative Problem-Solving

Hey there, innovation champions! Your smartest people are sitting on half-brilliant ideas. They’re waiting to make them bulletproof before sharing. Meanwhile, your competitors are testing rough prototypes and learning what actually works. I see this constantly when I work with high-achieving teams—researchers at Meta, leadership teams at healthcare companies, high-potentials at national creative agencies, audiences at my Creating […]

The 90-Minute Innovation Framework

Hey there, innovation champions! “We need to innovate, but we can’t pull people away from their desks.” If you’re a VP of L&D, a chapter president planning your annual conference, or a research director managing tight project timelines, you’ve said some version of this. Your team needs breakthrough thinking capabilities, but you can’t pause operations for elaborate training […]

Why Technical Teams Innovate Better Than “Creative Types” (When Given the Right Framework)

Hey there, innovation champions! The CEO of PMI San Francisco Bay Area had a problem. Her members—project managers who pride themselves on precision, process, and predictability—were facing an uncertain future with AI. Would AI take their jobs? How could they position themselves as strategic partners rather than task executors? And most pressingly: how do you prepare people for […]

Innovation Insights: Where Play Powers Breakthroughs

Articles