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

The 15 Minutes That Make Your Offsite Worth It

Click to watch (09:55) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Compliment I Almost Just Took Sunday morning, I led songs at a Flag Day event. Afterward, a woman who sings in my father’s choir came up to me. “You have such a strong voice,” she said. “You’re a wonderful song leader.” I said […]

Engineers Don’t Need to “Be More Creative.” They Need Permission.

Click to watch (18:08) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Story Your Engineers Tell Themselves (And How to Change It) I was first-chair viola in my high school chamber orchestra. The two violinists practiced constantly — before school, after school, weekends. I put in the bare minimum. Classical music wasn’t my passion, and […]

Why Innovation Training Doesn’t Stick

Click to watch (12:58) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Room That Changed Me It was around 2012. World Domination Summit, Portland. A few thousand people packed into a theater. Brené Brown walked onstage and, within the first few minutes, had us doing something deeply uncool. First, she had us strike a “cool” […]

You’ve Been Handed an Innovation Mandate. Now What?

Click to watch (06:46) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Call That Changes Everything You know the moment. A leader above you — maybe the CEO, maybe the board — decides it’s time. “We need to be more innovative. We need a culture where people take risks, generate ideas, move faster.” And somehow, […]

The Teams That Win Aren’t the Smartest — They’re the Fastest Learners

Click to watch (13:17) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! The Buzzer Goes Off I’m going to take you back to 2014 or so. I’m standing in a line at my first improv performance class, waiting for my turn, watching everyone ahead of me step up to do a scene with a partner. Simple […]

Innovation Doesn’t Need Better Ideas. It Needs Permission to Be Bad.

Click to watch (12:05) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Today I want to talk about something that is quietly killing innovation on your team. It’s not a lack of ideas. It’s not the wrong tools or the wrong people. It’s the unspoken rule that everything has to be good before anyone sees it. […]

Why “Play Hard” Isn’t What You Think It Is

Click to watch (11:26) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Here’s a common reaction I get when I tell leaders the first step of my innovation framework is called “Play Hard”: An almost imperceptible pause. A polite smile. And behind the eyes: Oh no. She’s going to make us do trust falls. I get […]

The Hidden Tax on Your Team’s Best Ideas

Click to watch (11:14) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Your team isn’t short on ideas.c They’re short on safety. And the difference between those two diagnoses determines whether your innovation initiative becomes a real culture shift — or just another offsite people talk about once and forget by February. The Job I Still […]

Why Engineers Are Actually Better at Innovation Than “Creative Types”

Click to watch (08:12) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Here’s something that might reframe how you think about your entire organization’s capacity for innovation: The people most likely to drive real breakthroughs aren’t the ones in your “creative” departments. They’re in your engineering teams. Your data science orgs. Your project management offices. And […]

What Brave Leadership Actually Looks Like

Click to watch (08:12) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Two weeks. Two virtual sessions. Two teams of researchers — analytical, a little introverted, equally uncertain about what they’d signed up for. On paper, identical. In practice, worlds apart. Two Sessions, Two Worlds Both sessions opened the same way: participants jotted down three personal […]

The Conversations I Keep Wanting to Have

Hey there, innovation champions! Most organizations say the right things about innovation. They write it into their values. They announce it in all-hands meetings. They fund initiatives, run workshops, and measure engagement scores. And then they wonder why nothing sticks. The Party Nobody Showed Up To I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a pattern I keep noticing […]

What to Do When You Can’t Download Skills Like Neo

Hey there, innovation champions! A while back, I was on a Zoom call with a VP at a local tech company. It wasn’t a sales call — just a customer research conversation. I wanted to understand what was getting in the way of innovation for leaders like her. She told me her organization had recently done some leadership […]

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 […]

The Hidden Cost of Innovation Theater (And How to Spot It)

Hey there, innovation champions! Here’s irony for you: there were years when I was making my living as a professional artist, when I made very little art. Oh, I sold a lot of art, but most of it was prints of art I’d created in previous years. I spent most of my time fulfilling orders, customizing designs on […]

From Juilliard to Google: Why Arts Training Creates Better Tech Leaders

Hey there, innovation champions! When I tell tech executives I’m a former Juilliard-trained dancer turned innovation strategist, I can practically see the mental math happening. They’re wondering: Does creativity have an ROI? Can someone from the arts really understand our technical constraints? Where are the case studies proving this works in our world? Here’s what they’re missing while […]

How to Build Innovation Capability in 90 Days (Without Disrupting Operations)

Hey there, innovation champions! “We need to become more innovative—but we can’t afford to disrupt operations.” I hear this tension from leaders constantly. They know their teams need innovation capability, but they can’t shut down production for culture transformation. Here’s the good news: You don’t have to choose between innovation and operations. Based on what I’ve learned from […]

Why Innovation Training Doesn’t Stick (And What Actually Does)

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR EARLY SUPPORTERS Want to read Innovation at Work before it launches? I’m looking for a small group of innovation champions to join my book launch team. You’ll get: ✨ Early access to the complete book (November 24-25) 📖 Exclusive bonus materials not available anywhere else 🎯 First look at all 52 micro-experiments before the world […]

The Project Manager’s Secret: How Analytical Minds Master Innovation (Better Than “Creative Types”)

Quick note: No video this week, as I’m head-down working on my second book, Innovation at Work. I’ve cleared my calendar to devote every spare minute to book production, which meant making some hard choices! Watch for videos to return in a few weeks. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s article! Hey there, innovation champions! I need to […]

Why Innovation Workshops Feel Good But Change Nothing (And What Actually Sticks)

Create the Impossible™: The Complete System for Systematic Innovation

Learn Fast: How to Turn Every Failure Into Competitive Intelligence

Quick note: I had an amazing time facilitating an interactive session in Oakland for PMI San Francisco Bay Area this weekend! And October 8 I’m leading a virtual session for AMA New Jersey on “Communicating for Influence: A Taste of the Toolkit.” It’s a busy week! No video this week, aside from client work, I’m head-down working […]

Make Crap: Why Productive Failure Beats Perfectionist Success

Quick note: Just back from keynoting in Alaska at NHRMA 2025. No video this week, as I’m head-down working on my second book, Innovation at Work. I’ve cleared my work calendar to devote every spare minute to book production, which meant making some hard choices! Watch for videos to return in a few weeks. In the meantime, […]

Play Hard: Why Your Team’s Survival Depends on Strategic Fun

💡 Quick favor! My new book Innovation at Work is coming soon, and I need your help choosing the cover. 🎉 Two designs are in the running, and I’d love your vote. 👉 Vote in this quick LinkedIn poll And if you’d like to share why you prefer one over the other, reply here or drop your thoughts in […]

The Multi-Billion Dollar Innovation Theater Problem

Quick note: No video this week, as I’m head-down working on my second book, Innovation at Work. I’ve cleared my calendar to devote every spare minute to book production, which meant making some hard choices! Plus a death in the family has thrown an added curveball into the mix. I’ll be out of state for the funeral for […]

Lost In Translation: Why Brilliant Innovations Fail to Launch

Click to watch (11:27) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Imagine you’re in a room full of brilliant minds—data scientists, researchers, managers—all buzzing with groundbreaking ideas. The energy is electric. Innovation seems inevitable. But then… nothing happens. Sound familiar? Today we’re diving into one of the biggest innovation killers I see […]

Back-to-School Innovation: Creating a Learning Organization

Click to watch (10:27) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! When I was a kid, much as I dreaded the end of summer freedom, I confess I loved the fresh start feeling of “back to school.” New binder, new backpack, new pencils and erasers. With the unknown territory of a new teacher […]

The Ultimate Innovation Lab: No Code – Just Courage

Click to watch (14:44) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! This past week, I had the incredible opportunity to step inside what might be the most effective innovation lab I’ve ever witnessed. No, I wasn’t at Google’s X Lab or Meta’s Reality Labs. I wasn’t surrounded by cutting-edge technology or million-dollar prototypes. […]

Innovation in the Pressure Cooker: Maintaining Creativity Under Deadline

Click to watch (12:08) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Have you ever noticed how some of your best ideas come when you’re under pressure? Today I want to share a story that completely changed how I think about deadlines and creativity—and how you can harness the power of the pressure cooker to fuel […]

You Are Not a Prompt. You Are the Creator.

Click to watch (13:42) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Did you know I’m a singer-songwriter? However, for years, I didn’t write a single new song. Not one. Now, I’ve never been the most prolific—or speedy— of songwriters, but still, this creative drought felt… well, let’s just say it wasn’t great for […]

When Your Inner Gremlins Drive the Bus: Six Cultural Drivers That Make or Break Innovation

Click to watch (20:39) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! “I missed seeing more of you onstage today.” Those words from my teammate hit harder than any bad review could have. We’d just finished our performance at the California Long-form Improv Festival in LA, and I knew exactly what she meant. […]

Nature’s Innovation Blueprint: Learning from the Ultimate Designer

Click to watch (18:41) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Back when I was a professional artist, I used to meet once a month with a group of about a dozen fellow calligraphers. Some were professionals, like myself, others pursued calligraphy as an avocation. Sara, the one who invited me to the […]

The Mid-Summer Innovation Boost: Keeping Momentum Through the Heat

Click to watch (14:20) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! I’m about to tell you a story about a poster I created in April 2016, but here’s the thing — I almost didn’t share this story because I wanted it to fit perfectly with summer momentum. I kept thinking, “But it wasn’t summer! […]

Innovation Through Play: Why Fun Drives Breakthrough Thinking

Click to watch (13:31) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Back when I was a professional artist, after years of making art for clients, I knew I needed to get back to making art just for the joy of it. And I knew the path to get there was play. But here’s the […]

The Summer Innovation Mindset: Creating in Season

Click to watch (11:32) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! It’s that time of year when the pace seems to slow down, teams are cycling through vacation schedules, and there’s this collective exhale that happens across the tech world. But here’s what I’ve learned: summer isn’t a season to coast—it’s actually the perfect […]

The Freedom to Create: Removing Innovation Barriers

Click to watch (13:36) or scroll down to read more The Canvas That Changed Everything Hey there, innovation champions! Imagine this scene for a moment: I’m standing in my studio, holding a pristine canvas I’d owned for years. Still wrapped in plastic. Still untouched. Why? Because every time I looked at it, my inner gremlin whispered, “Who […]

Innovation Through Inclusion: The Power of Diverse Perspectives

Click to watch (14:59) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Last week at a conference in DC, I heard a story that stopped me in my tracks. It was one of those moments that makes you realize how much you don’t know about the world around you. A delegate from Yellowstone was […]

Peak Innovation: Maintaining Creative Momentum

Click to watch (15:47) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! Melissa Dinwiddie here. When you were a kid, did you ever experience a blackout, or a hurricane, that disrupted normal life for a bit? Maybe you had to go without electricity or water for a day or two. If it’s for a […]

The Innovation Legacy: Building Cultures That Last

Click to watch (15:01) or scroll down to read more Hey there, innovation champions! My brother and sister-in-law just celebrated their anniversary. Not a “big” one, but as I called to wish them well and asked if they were celebrating, my brother said they were helping their teenage son with homework. So… that would be a no. […]

Innovation Insights: Where Play Powers Breakthroughs

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