Innovation expert: the title that cannot be claimed

I have expressed doubts before about putting the words expert and innovation next to each other. So the fair question is whether anybody can become an innovation expert at all, and whether it is a matter of personality, training or track record.

Innovative ideas come from everywhere, which is true and not very useful. They come first from curious people who are interested in others and capable of connecting several fields of knowledge, and from people who are not frightened of hierarchy or of what anybody thinks of them.

Now go and look for that on a resume. Ask yourself honestly whether you will find the capacity to innovate, to be creative and to stay curious anywhere in a document designed to demonstrate reliability.

My answer to the question runs against the whole category, including the version of it I sell. An innovation expert cannot be certified in advance and cannot honestly claim the title. Expertise here is conferred afterwards, by somebody outside asking how you did it.

I know this because none of the three ventures I built were innovation projects. We had no idea we were innovating. We were doing business differently from our competitors in order to survive, and somebody else supplied the label years later.

The credential offered	Why it proves nothing	The evidence that counts
Qualifications and case studiesAn innovation expert is normally assessed on training, published thinking, a client list and a supply of stories about famous founders. None of that requires having built anything, and all of it can be assembled from public material in an afternoon.	Innovation does not appear on a resumeCuriosity, indifference to hierarchy and the ability to connect unrelated fields leave no trace in a document designed to demonstrate reliability. Organisations rarely ask staff for those qualities, which is why the credential and the capability come apart.	Somebody outside came lookingExpertise in this field is conferred retrospectively rather than claimed in advance. The usable test is whether a competent outsider with no reason to flatter anybody sought out their method, and who that outsider was.

Why expert and innovation sit badly together

The discomfort in the phrase is not squeamishness about the word expert. It comes from a genuine mismatch between what the credential can demonstrate and what the work requires, and the mismatch runs deeper than people usually admit.

What you cannot find on a resume

Innovation is more a state of mind than a conventional expertise. It requires insatiable curiosity, an openness to ideas from unrelated fields, and the nerve to question something that is currently working perfectly well.

What distinguishes the people who are good at it is the capacity to connect apparently unrelated concepts and to imagine answers that cross traditional boundaries. None of those three things appears on a resume or in a professional profile, because neither document was built to record them.

The people who tend to be good at it also share a quality organisations find inconvenient. They are largely indifferent to hierarchy and to what other people think, which is the trait I have written about at length in the case for recruiting the people who will contradict you.

The contradiction inside the job description

Here is the part nobody says out loud in a recruitment conversation. Since when has an organisation asked its people to be indifferent to hierarchy and to conventional opinion, and to accept a reality where originality outranks conformity?

The honest answer is almost never, and certainly not in writing. Which means the qualities that produce innovation are the ones most performance systems are designed to moderate.

What the credential actually has to prove

So this is the moment to ask what you actually want from somebody working with you on innovation. There are two available answers and they are not equally useful.

Experts with a reassuring qualification, who will tell you attractive stories about the same three or four famous founders, all of which anybody could find in five minutes of searching. Or specialists explaining that a cathedral took more than a thousand innovations to build, which is genuinely interesting and no help at all unless you are building a cathedral.

The alternative is experiments and a way of seeing the world different from yours, with both feet planted in the reality of your own business. Skills, experience, qualifications and anecdotes are one category of evidence. A record of having done something is another.

It would also be reductive, and frankly beside the point, to judge somebody’s capacity to innovate by what they are wearing. A suit and tie may suggest a degree of conservatism and they do not disqualify anybody. What matters is whether the person brings water to the mill or simply preaches without practising.

Expertise is conferred, not claimed

Here is the argument this article rests on. Nobody can honestly present themselves as an innovation expert in advance, because the label is applied by other people after the fact, and usually by people who had no reason to be generous about it.

Nobody I worked with thought we were innovating

To be clear about my own record: we had no idea we were doing innovation. We were doing business differently from our competitors in order to survive, which is a considerably less impressive description of the same activity.

None of the three ventures set out to be disruptive for the pleasure of disrupting. Innovation emerged from the need to differentiate, from answering something nobody was answering, or from doing things in a way better matched to what the market wanted and what customers valued.

Those businesses had no intention of doing innovation in the academic sense of the term. They were trying to survive a competitive environment by being creative and adaptable, and it is frequently that pragmatic, problem-solving version that turns out to be the most consequential.

The test: who came looking for your method

If expertise is conferred rather than claimed, then a buyer needs to know who conferred it. That gives a test far more useful than a credential check, and it takes one question.

Ask who has come to this person to find out how they did something, and whether that person had any reason to flatter them. A competitor asking how you built something is evidence. A satisfied client saying you were a pleasure to work with is a testimonial, which is a different category of thing.

Innovation does not need to be proclaimed to be recognised. It shows up in results and in the interest other people take in the method, which is why the enquiry from outside is the strongest available signal.

Be equally sceptical about the expert who arrives explaining how many brilliant ideas they have generated for numerous clients. Dig a little. An idea count at the end of a brainstorm proves nothing, and the questions worth asking are how many of those ideas were actually built and what they returned.

Why deliberate innovation passes the same test

The obvious objection is that this standard romanticises accident. Plenty of real innovation is deliberate, funded and methodical, and a test that rewards not having noticed what you were doing would disqualify most of the pharmaceutical industry.

The test is not about intention. It is about who came looking afterwards, and a deliberately planned innovation attracts exactly the same enquiry from outsiders as an accidental one does.

There is a second objection worth owning, since it is the sharper one. A standard like this is conveniently met by the person proposing it, and loosely applied it lets anybody reframe an ordinary business decision as unrecognised genius.

Which is why the identity of the enquirer carries the whole weight. Named, competent, with no commercial reason to be kind. Without that, the claim is unfalsifiable and should be treated as such, including when I make it.

Three ventures that were never innovation projects

Since the argument is that evidence beats credentials, here is mine. Three businesses, none of which described itself as innovative at the time, and each of which turned out to have inverted something its category treated as fixed.

Inside HR, borrowing from dating sites and talent agents

Inside HR was a recruitment business in Sydney, and the approach came from two industries with nothing to do with recruitment. We took the matching logic of dating platforms and the representation model of talent agencies, and applied both to hiring.

On the client side that meant asking them to give a candidate’s values the same weight as their qualifications, which at the time was an argument rather than a service. Most recruitment sold a filtered list against a specification, and we were selling a judgment about fit.

On the candidate side we selected the strongest people in a field and then offered to act as their agent. That inverted the relationship entirely: they were talent worth representing rather than applicants worth screening, which is how an agency for performers works and not at all how an agency for engineers and sales directors worked.

Nobody involved called it innovation. It was a way of competing against much larger recruiters without their budgets, and the convention we broke, that candidates are supply rather than talent, was not a convention anybody had noticed choosing.

Technoraid, selling applications rather than options

Technoraid took a view of vehicle construction that broke with the established model. Rather than selling a vehicle with its options determined at the factory, we sold applications that could be installed after purchase and adapted to particular race conditions.

The idea came from software rather than from automotive engineering. A phone gets more capable after you buy it, and there was no physical reason a vehicle could not work the same way, which turned a car into something closer to a platform than a product.

The moment that matters for this article came later. When the major carmakers began asking how we had designed a performant vehicle in six months, we understood we had done something genuinely original.

That enquiry is the whole test in one sentence. Competitors with vastly greater resources and no reason whatever to flatter a small operation came looking for the method, which is a form of recognition no certificate supplies.

Glukoze, management schools taught by managers

With Glukoze I help organisations build their own management school for their own managers. The inversion is who teaches: not business school academics and not professional trainers, but managers.

Those managers can come from the client organisations themselves, which is where it becomes genuinely unusual. An innovation director from one large corporate has taught inside another, and the arrangement works precisely because the person at the front of the room is doing the job rather than describing it.

How to check an innovation expert’s record

Everything above suggests a short set of checks that a credential cannot satisfy. They take one conversation, they can all be answered with names and dates, and a weak candidate fails them audibly.

Three questions and what the answers reveal

Read the third column before the second. What you are listening for is whether the answer contains other people’s names, since a record involves other parties and a story does not.

Question	A weak answer sounds like	A strong answer contains
Who has come to you to ask how you did something?	Client testimonials, awards, audience numbers	A named party with no reason to flatter, and what they asked
What have you built, and what happened to it afterwards?	A list of engagements and frameworks	Dates, collaborators, and what it returned or cost
Which of your ideas failed, and what changed as a result?	A generalisation about learning from failure	A specific attempt, why it failed, and the practice that changed

The third question is the one worth asking of any consultant rather than only an innovation specialist. Ask them to share the failures they have lived through, the reasons, what they took from them, and what changed in their practice so the same thing does not happen again, particularly at your expense.

One more check that costs nothing. Anybody offering a guaranteed number of ideas from a session is selling the wrong thing, and the number quoted is usually two hundred. What matters is not how many notes end up on a wall, it is whether the people in the room felt permitted to say what they actually thought.

Where this stops and the booking decision starts

These three questions establish whether somebody has a record. They do not tell you whether that person suits the slot you are filling, which is a separate decision with its own criteria.

An opening keynote buys energy and permission, a working session buys a method people can apply, and the same credible expert can be right for one and wrong for the other. Whatever type of innovation you are pursuing, and I have set the four out in the four innovation strategies, anybody working with you has to start by understanding who you are.

That matters more than it sounds when you select ideas afterwards. The first filter on any idea coming out of a creative session should be how well it fits your values and your culture, ahead of cost, feasibility or timeline, because an idea that contradicts what the organisation believes will not survive contact with the people asked to build it.

What the expert is actually for

Assuming the record holds up, there is still the question of what the person is supposed to do once they are in the building. The answer is less flattering to the expert than most experts would like.

The Disraeli test

There is a story about William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, told as legend rather than as documented history, and I have never been able to establish that it happened. In the week before one of their contests for the premiership, both are said to have invited the same journalist to dinner.

Afterwards she reportedly said that with Mr Gladstone she thought she had spent the evening with the cleverest man in England, and that after dining with Mr Disraeli she thought she was the cleverest person in England.

An innovation expert has to be a Disraeli. The job is to guide a client without a predetermined destination, to help them reach the most valuable ideas through a method, and to head off the traps and dangers along the way without ever imposing a personal view.

Which produces a straightforward test for anybody who has just sat through a session. Did you leave impressed by the expert, or did you leave thinking you were the cleverest person in your own organisation?

Naked consulting, and designing your own removal

Following that through requires a specific kind of humility. The expert has to be willing to let the client believe they would have got there without them, which is the basis of what I call naked consulting in the anti-consultant chapter of my book on this trade.

It is a commercially inconvenient position and I hold it anyway. An expert whose value depends on the client continuing to need them has an incentive pointing directly against the client’s interest, and I have set that argument out in full in the piece on what consulting is actually selling.

The same logic explains the footnote at the bottom of this article. Somebody who genuinely holds this position cannot comfortably use the title, because the title claims in advance what the work can only demonstrate afterwards.

How I can help, and how to check that I can

Everything above applies to me, and the honest thing to do with a page targeting the phrase innovation expert is to invite the reader to run their own test on it rather than to assert anything.

Keynotes and workshops

My keynotes are built on things I have run rather than on famous founders, which is a deliberate constraint and occasionally a commercial disadvantage. A room that wants inspiring stories about somebody else’s company should book somebody else.

Workshops work on your own material and your own conventions, and they begin with your values rather than with a method, for the reason set out above. An idea that contradicts what your organisation believes will be killed by the people asked to build it, whatever the workshop concluded.

Diagnostics and programs

Diagnostics establish which kind of innovation your organisation can actually carry, since most cannot carry the one they have funded. The distinction between the ambitious labels is set out in the comparison of disruptive and breakthrough innovation.

If you want to run the three questions on me, do it directly. You can ask me who has come looking for one of my methods and why, and judge the answer by whether it contains other people’s names.

Conclusion: the title cannot be claimed

You will not find the capacity to innovate on a resume, in a professional profile or in a qualification, because none of those documents was designed to record curiosity, indifference to hierarchy or the ability to connect unrelated fields.

What you can find is a record. Three ventures of mine were built as ways of surviving against larger competitors, and each of them turns out to have inverted something its category treated as permanent, which nobody involved noticed at the time.

So when you are assessing an innovation expert, stop checking the credential and ask who came looking for the method. Named, competent, with nothing to gain by being kind. That single question separates a record from a repertoire.

And apply it here too, since a page that targets this phrase should be held to its own standard. Normally, in any case, an innovation expert never calls himself one.

Frequently asked questions about becoming an innovation expert