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

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 […]

Innovation Insights: Where Play Powers Breakthroughs

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