How top industry leaders are breaking down barriers in product management and innovation

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TLDR

Three innovation consultants—Matt Phillips, Mike Hyzy, and Will Evans—share insights from facilitating the executive innovation track at PDMA’s Ignite Innovation Conference. The session brought together 25 senior directors and VPs from Fortune 100 companies to discuss their most pressing innovation challenges. They discussed key challenges to innovation, including managing capacity to carve out space for innovation work, driving AI adoption across the workforce, and building innovation cultures that spread beyond dedicated innovation teams. Solutions discussed include celebrating effort over success, creating visible recognition systems for innovators, and developing innovation models that train innovation champions across different parts of organizations.

Introduction

What happens when innovation executives from across industries gather in one room to surface their most urgent challenges? In this discussion, we’re going behind the scenes of the Executive Innovation Track at PDMA’s Ignite Innovation conference—a rare opportunity where leaders dropped their guard and revealed the real innovation challenges keeping them up at night. We’ll discuss the actual challenges executives are facing right now, discover which constraints matter most, and learn how leaders are breaking through their biggest innovation barriers. 

Our guests facilitated this executive session. Matt Phillips founded Phillips & Co., advising companies like Paramount Pictures and Pepsi on accelerating innovation. Mike Hyzy leads CGI’s Product Studio, helping organizations turn AI and emerging tech into market-winning products. Will Evans from Fugue Strategy brings strategic foresight and Theory of Constraints expertise to help companies build adaptive organizations. 

Find out more about the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and next year’s innovation conference.

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers

Challenges in Innovation

Managing Capacity for Innovation
Will Evans highlighted that executives struggle to carve out capacity—both internal and external resources—to do innovation work while managing existing operations. Organizations face the tension between day-to-day operational demands and the need to invest in future innovation.

AI Adoption and ROI
Mike Hyzy identified low adoption rates as a major challenge. Even after selecting AI platforms (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot, etc.), only 15% of employees typically use these tools. Without widespread adoption, organizations can’t achieve the promised ROI from AI investments. The challenge extends across different personas and roles, from knowledge workers to engineers.

Culture and Spreading Innovation Beyond the Few
Matt Phillips found that culture is a barrier to innovation. Executives are facing challenges trying to spread innovation beyond dedicated NPD or innovation groups. Leadership attitudes and organizational culture often prevent employees from suggesting ideas or taking innovation risks.

Solutions and Approaches

Celebrating Effort, Not Just Success
Organizations should recognize teams and individuals who attempt innovation, even when efforts don’t result in products. One manufacturing company created an “innovation wall” that celebrates anyone who suggests an idea or launches a product, reinforcing that innovation is valued regardless of outcome.

Moving Beyond Monetary Rewards
Effective recognition goes beyond financial incentives. Visibility matters—putting people on pedestals, sharing their stories, and creating narrative examples that shape culture. Recognition should be authentic and tied to what makes individuals feel valued in their specific organizational context.

Change Management Evolution
The discussion highlighted that template-driven change management is becoming less effective. Organizations need to relearn how to manage through change, starting with individual transformation rather than top-down mandates.

Breaking Down Silos Through Transparency and Communication
Organizational silos create significant waste and duplication. Executives shared examples of teams discovering they’d been working on identical projects for months, spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars unnecessarily. One IT leader from a large insurance company stressed the importance of making roadmaps and IT system implementations visible across the organization to prevent duplicate software license purchases and redundant project work. Effective communication unlocks innovation. Large companies excel at building silos, making continuous visibility into ongoing work critical for innovation efficiency.

Middle Management Resistance
Middle management often creates bottlenecks in the innovation process. While entry-level employees feel free to generate ideas and senior management supports experimentation, middle management can be threatened by new ideas or uncertain how to handle them, causing proposals to stall out. One executive’s advice for addressing this challenge was for lower-level employees to consider going around middle management directly to senior leadership to get approval for experiments.

Accountability and Follow-Through
Accountability is necessary for turning conference insights into action. After Matt’s team created a comfortable environment where executives openly shared their challenges, Mike and Will structured the second half of the workshop around identifying specific bottlenecks and Monday-morning actions. The session concluded with a deliberate accountability mechanism: Participants were paired with partners and instructed to reach out in 30 days and ask: “Did you do the things you said you were going to do in this workshop?” Often conference attendees absorb tremendous information over three days but struggle to implement changes when they return to work. By creating peer accountability partnerships and planning follow-up emails to reinforce commitments, the facilitators aimed to ensure executives actually execute on their stated intentions rather than letting insights fade without action.

Innovation Barriers in Academia and the Organizational-Market Mismatch
Will Evans described insights from the 25% of attendees with academic backgrounds. While universities are often viewed as hotbeds of innovation, they face the same organizational impediments as corporations. Academic participants reported struggling with the same challenges as their peers in industry: getting cross-functional groups together for basic tasks like IP licensing deals, navigating bottlenecks and policies that prevent commercializing novel university-generated innovations, and dealing with cultural inertia that blocks progress. Even converting university IP into commercial products faces numerous structural barriers. Across both academic and corporate organizations, there can be a mismatch between organizational structures and their markets. Despite these challenges, participants found solidarity at the conference, where leaders recognized they’re all facing similar struggles.

Useful Links

• Connect with Will, Mike, and Matt on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Phillips & Co.

Innovation Quote

“Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity—not a threat.” – Steve Jobs

Application Questions

1. Capacity Allocation: How does your organization balance the tension between operational demands and carving out dedicated capacity for innovation work? What specific mechanisms or rituals help protect innovation time from being consumed by day-to-day priorities?
2. AI Adoption Strategy: If your organization has invested in AI tools but adoption remains low, what behavioral barriers prevent wider use? How might you apply principles from behavioral economics, gamification, or habit psychology to increase meaningful adoption among product teams and stakeholders?
3. Culture Beyond the Innovation Team: In what ways does your organizational culture either enable or inhibit innovation contributions from people outside the formal product or innovation functions? What would celebrating effort over success look like in your specific context, and how could you implement recognition that feels authentic rather than performative?
4. Federated vs. Centralized Innovation: What are the trade-offs between a centralized innovation team model and a federated approach that trains champions across different business units? Which model better fits your organization’s structure, culture, and innovation maturity level?
5. Change Management Approaches: How is your organization approaching the current wave of AI-driven transformation? Are you relying on template-driven change management, or are you creating space for individuals to lead their own change process? What would need to shift to move toward more emergent, individual-driven transformation?

Bio

Mike Hyzy leads AI product innovation and strategic foresight at CGI, where he launched the product management practice and designed the AI Adoption Framework (A3F). As part of CGI’s national AI strategy team, he develops new solutions with internal teams and advises client executives on how to turn emerging AI capabilities into business advantage. Mike applies strategic foresight to separate signal from noise, giving leaders a clear view of emerging trajectories and the choices that matter for long-term strategy. 

Matt Phillips is a leading expert on strategy and innovation. For over 20 years, Matt has been an in-demand advisor to the Fortune 500, large nonprofits and rapidly growing mid-sized companies. As the founder of Phillips & Co., a Chicago-based innovation think tank, Matt leads a team of researchers, strategists and inventors who help organizations invent new products, services and businesses. Their clients include Paramount Pictures, Dell, Verizon, Purina, Pella, the National Science Foundation, the TSA, and the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. Matt holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Conservatory Program in Improv at The Second City.

Will Evans brings a wealth of experience with several of the best-known and most successful companies in experience design, healthcare, and the consumer web. He focuses on integrating design thinking and service design to delight customers and increase profitability. Essential to that effort is the development of future-casting organizational transformation teams that can work seamlessly across organizational functions—an area where Will brings deep expertise. Equal parts business strategist and creative visionary, he has served as a principal and executive creative director for design organizations and functions where he built teams, a client base, and products and services from the ground up. He holds patents for several products he designed in online search and navigation systems. Will has led transformational initiatives for Fortune 50 companies across a range of industries, as well as for start-ups and nonprofits. He has designed and built out enterprise digital/product transformation offices to sustain cultures of continuous discovery and delivery. He advises clients on driving innovation and the behavioral and culture change required to support it while creating products, services, capabilities, and ecosystems that improve the bottom line. Will is inspired by the next generation of design thinkers and lean practitioners. He has been a lecturer in the graduate design, technology, and business strategy programs as Design-Thinker-in-Residence at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Will has taught and facilitated design thinking sessions with Simon Sinek with TED Global Prize winners. He holds a Jonah, certified in Theory of Constraints from the Goldratt Institute, and more recently, he is the author of “Designing Resilience: The Strategy, Structure, and Spirit of Enterprise Agility.”

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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