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

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 […]

Innovation Insights: Where Play Powers Breakthroughs

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