In our work with leaders, we often encounter the most common failure in innovation: the implementation gap – the distance between a validated idea and a working reality.
Many organisations are strong in key parts of the innovation journey. They can run workshops, generate ideas, and build concepts. They have done everything the typical process asks of them. And then, it stalls. The prototype doesn’t scale. The insight goes unacted on. The innovation does not stick.
So, why do these efforts often falter? What is needed to close the gap and ensure innovation lasts?
New Zealand organisations do not have an innovation idea problem. They have an innovation finishing problem.
What is the innovation implementation gap?
The innovation implementation gap is the point where most innovation processes end, but sustained organisational change has yet to begin.
Most design-based innovation processes – including design thinking – stop at a phase called something like ‘test’ or ‘deliver’. While this might make sense for external consultants, for internal leaders, the story continues.
For that leader, the handover is not the end. It is the beginning of the harder work:
- How do you build the internal case for resourcing an unproven idea?
- How do you facilitate the flow of ideas and collaboration inside and outside of the organisation?
- How do you navigate the organisational politics that will push back against new thinking?
- How do you get people to actually change their behaviour – not just agree with the idea in a workshop?
- How do you sustain momentum when the urgency of the project fades, and business as usual reasserts itself?
These are not just execution questions; they are design questions. Most innovation frameworks offer little guidance on how to address them. This gap – where the typical process ends but the need for progress continues – is often where innovation fails.
Research by Kuratko and colleagues confirms what we have seen in practice: the vast majority of innovation projects fail, predominantly during implementation – not during ideation.
Why the gap exists
The implementation gap is no accident; it is the result of how most stage-gate type innovation processes were constructed.
Design thinking emerged as a way to apply the artistic, intuitive, reflective problem-solving approaches of design practitioners – architects and product designers to ‘wicked’ VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) type problems that are often found in organisational and societal settings, rather than one-off consulting type projects that tend to stop at ‘test’ or ‘deliver’.
But you are not a consultant; the work continues. The challenge of getting an innovation actually adopted -of changing behaviour at scale, of sustaining momentum, of resourcing commitment, of scaling ideas, of behavioural change and organisational resistance – is yours to carry.
This is the insight that led us to develop the DUCTRI framework. Born from watching MBA students master the early phases of innovation, only to return to their organisations and struggle to implement anything. The problem was not their capability. The process stopped too early.
Looking closely at the frameworks being taught and used, we found the same structural gap in all of them. The DUCTRI process goes further, including Resourcing and Implementing as core phases rather than afterthoughts. Together, we have refined the process and toolkit across hundreds of innovation, transformation and change projects.
In our view, innovation is realised when creative solutions are actually implemented, creating and capturing value.
The DUCTRI framework: three mindsets, six phases
DUCTRI (pronounced duck-tree) organises the innovation journey into six phases arranged in three pairs. Each pair draws on a different dominant mindset, and each phase alternates between divergent and convergent thinking. That rhythm is deliberate. Spending too little time in the divergent mode means you end up making choices from a limited range of options. Most business education defaults to convergent thinking – analysis, decision-making, selection. DUCTRI builds the divergent counterpart back in.
The three mindset pairs work like this.
Curiosity: Discovering and Understanding
The first pair is driven by curiosity. Discovering is a divergent phase — getting out into the field, talking to people, exploring widely and resisting the pull toward early conclusions. Understanding is the convergent counterpart — making sense of what you found, surfacing the problem behind the problem, and landing on a small number of clear insights that will guide what comes next.
This is the key point of the journey, where design thinking offers huge value. Starting with the human rather than the solution, exploring before converging, building a genuine understanding of a complex situation – these are well-developed practices.
Creativity: Creating and Testing
The second pair is driven by creativity. Creating is divergent again – generating a wide range of possible responses to the problem before narrowing to the most promising. Testing is convergent – building rough, low-cost prototypes, getting real feedback from real people, and learning fast before committing resources.
Most innovation processes are reasonably strong through to this point. The workshop ends, the prototype is built, and the concept is validated. And then, for most organisations, the process runs out.
Clarity: Resourcing and Implementing
The third pair is driven by clarity – and it is the pair that most frameworks omit entirely. Resourcing is a divergent phase: exploring the full range of capital available to advance the work. This is not just financial capital. The social capital – the trust, relationships, and coalitions of support needed to move new thinking through an organisation is often more important than the budget, and far more often neglected.
Implementing is convergent: designing the human dimensions of change so that new behaviour actually takes hold. This is where an understanding of how people actually adopt new ways of working becomes essential. Rational persuasion alone rarely works. The environment, the incentives, the social norms, and the path of least resistance all need to be deliberately shaped.
DUCTRI is built for the full journey, supporting leaders through the critical final phases, ensuring ideas are not just developed but successfully embedded and scaled within the organisation.
What the gap looks like in practice
The innovation implementation gap appears differently across sectors, but the pattern is consistent.
In the public sector
Government agencies can be good at the discovery and understanding phases. They invest in user research, co-design, and community engagement. The gap appears when the findings need to be translated into policy or service change. The machinery of government procurement processes, ministerial sign-off, and budget cycles is not designed to quickly absorb new thinking. Without a deliberate resourcing and implementation strategy, even compelling insights get absorbed into the system without changing it.
In commercial organisations
In commercial settings, the gap most often appears between the prototype and the business case. A promising concept gets developed and validated, but the path from ‘this works in a pilot’ to ‘this is funded and rolling out’ was never mapped in advance. The prototype cannot find a home, not because it is not good enough, but because nobody built the resourcing and implementing pathway while the idea was being developed.
In education and workforce development
Some of the clearest examples of the implementation gap, and of what it looks like when it is successfully closed, come from outside the obvious ‘innovation sectors’. The Engineering Education to Employment programme in New Zealand is one of them.
CASE STUDY Carl Davidson – Chief Curiosity Officer, The Curiosity Company
The E2E programme was designed to address a forecast shortfall in the number of engineers being trained in New Zealand. The Tertiary Education Commission had identified a specific gap: not enough associate engineers, technicians, and technologists were entering the workforce.
The discovery work revealed something counterintuitive: the real intervention needed to happen not at university but in primary school classrooms. The stories teachers told about engineering – or didn’t – were shaping students’ sense of what was possible for them, years before any career decision was made.
We designed the implementation. Providing clarity: what engineering actually was, what paths were available, what a career could look like. Motivating people’s emotional core – that engineers had made the world and could remake it. That became the campaign theme. And, removing the barriers – reframing the calculus requirement for associate engineers, showing that support was available, and making the first step feel achievable.
The point is not the campaign itself. It is the full design process on display. The discovery revealed where the real problem lay. The implementation work – deliberately designed, behaviourally grounded – is what made the impact. Without that back-end, the research would have produced a report. As a result, a national programme was developed.
At the national scale
The organisational-level pattern is mirrored at the national level. McKinsey’s research across thousands of organisations confirms that roughly 70 per cent of large-scale transformations fail – and the largest share of value is lost during implementation, not planning. Less than one-third of organisations report that their transformation was successful at both improving performance and sustaining those improvements over time.
In New Zealand, the numbers tell the same story at scale. Annual productivity growth has averaged just 0.2 per cent since 2011 – one of the worst records in the OECD. In 2023, labour productivity dropped by 0.9 per cent, multifactor productivity fell by 2.2 per cent, and capital productivity declined by 3.8 per cent. New Zealand consistently invests in the inputs to innovation. What we have consistently struggled with is converting that investment into sustained output. That is the innovation implementation gap at the national scale. Closing this gap will require coordinated action by industry, academia and government to ensure our investments drive tangible results.
How to close the gap
Closing the gap is not about working harder on the same process. It is about extending the process into the territory most frameworks leave blank. In our experience, three things make the difference.
1. Fully understand the context
A common reason for innovation failing is that the organisational context was never properly understood. Who holds the power to resource this? What has been tried before, and why did it stall? What is the political landscape around this particular change? These are not peripheral questions. They are discovering and understanding questions that apply not just to the problem being solved, but also to the organisation that needs to implement the solution.
Rushing this is tempting, especially when there is energy and momentum from a good workshop. Resist it. The organisations that implement most successfully spend as much time understanding the implementation context as they do understanding the original problem.
2. Consider resources inside and outside the organisation
Most resourcing conversations in NZ organisations are too narrow. They focus on budget, headcount, and internal approval. But the resources available to advance a new idea are much wider than that.
Inside the organisation: who are the early adopters who will use the new approach before it is proven? Who has credibility with the people who need to change? Who is connected to the decision-makers? These are forms of social and symbolic capital, and they are often more important than the financial case.
Outside the organisation: are there partners, funders, research institutions, or community groups whose involvement would strengthen the case and share the risk?
3. Implement with people, not to them
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is the people. This principle applies as much to implementation as it does to discovery. The organisations that implement most successfully do not communicate a change and then manage the resistance. They design the implementation with the people who will be living it.
That means involving frontline staff, clinicians, farmers, teachers – whoever you are trying to help or is impacted by the initiative – in shaping how the change is introduced. Not as a consultation exercise after the decisions are made, but as genuine co-designers of the implementation pathway. When people have helped build something, they are far more likely to back it when it gets hard.
The Carl Davidson case earlier shows this in practice. The E2E programme worked not because it told students and teachers what to do, but because it engineered the conditions – the stories, the framing, the removal of barriers – that made a different choice feel natural. Implementing with people, not to them, is not a values statement. It is a practical strategy for making change stick.
Frequently asked questions
The innovation implementation gap is the distance between a validated idea and a working reality. It exists because most innovation processes were designed by consultants whose job ends at delivery. For a leader inside an organisation, that is only half the journey. The remaining work – resourcing, coalition-building, behaviour change, and sustained implementation – requires an extended, unique set of tools.
It is a universal problem, but it has particular characteristics in the NZ context. NZ organisations – especially in the public sector – tend to be risk-averse, resource-constrained, and subject to frequent leadership transitions that can orphan innovation initiatives mid-stream. The small scale of the NZ market also means there is less organisational slack to absorb the disruption that implementation requires. These factors do not cause the gap, but they make it wider and harder to bridge.
Change management is typically applied after a decision has been made – it manages the human response to a change that has already been defined. The innovation implementation gap begins earlier: at the point where an innovative idea has been validated but has not yet been resourced or embedded. Closing the gap requires elements of change management, as well as resourcing and implementation design. It is a broader challenge than change management alone can address.
DUCTRI stands for Discovering, Understanding, Creating, Testing, Resourcing and Implementing – a six-phase innovation framework developed by Christian Walsh and me over ten years of working with organisations across NZ and internationally. The first four phases align broadly with established design thinking practice. The final two phases, Resourcing and Implementing, are the ones most frameworks omit. DUCTRI treats these as core phases, not afterthoughts, and provides specific tools and practices for navigating each one.
Longer than most organisations plan for. A well-run design thinking process might take four to twelve weeks to reach a validated prototype. The implementation journey that follows – resourcing, coalition-building, behaviour change, embedding at scale – typically takes six to eighteen months for a significant organisational change, and longer for system-level transformation. Organisations that plan for this reality implement more successfully than those that treat implementation as a brief, final step.
About the author
Vaughan Broderick is an Innovation Implementation Strategist at the University of Canterbury Centre for Entrepreneurship and an Executive MBA educator based in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has worked with hundreds of leaders and teams across the NZ public sector, healthcare, agriculture, and commercial sectors over almost a decade of innovation practice.
He is the co-author of Innovation in Action (Wiley, July 2026), written with Christian Walsh. The book is built around the DUCTRI framework – a practical guide for leaders who want innovation that sticks, not stalls. It has been endorsed by Jeremy Utley (Stanford d.school), Jim Kalbach (MURAL), Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva (Reinvention Academy), David Bland (co-author Testing Business Ideas), and David Meates MNZM, among others.
Vaughan also hosts the Innovation in Action podcast, writes the Future-state Thinking Newsletter, and regularly speaks and consults to industry.