GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

For three decades, I’ve had a front-row seat observing the global Innovation Movement. Before chief innovation officers, before design thinking workshops, before Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen rocked our world with The Innovator’s Dilemma, I was writing about thinkers, innovators, and visionaries and the future of innovation.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a powerful realization swept through the corporate world: Mergers and acquisitions were no longer enough. Operational excellence was not enough. Organic growth was paramount; new sources of value needed to be discovered. New business models imagined. Companies across the board realized that innovation was no longer optional. It was becoming central to long-term survival. A movement towards unleashing innovation was born.

Vanguard companies like Procter & Gamble, IBM, Citibank, Whirlpool, and others led the way. Part discipline, part crusade, the Innovation Movement was grounded in the notion that innovation was a strategic discipline, not a side issue.

Over the next 25 years, a host of new tools, metrics, and frameworks were invented to help firms get better at driving growth through innovation. As a futurist and innovation champion, I helped spread the gospel of “innovation as a permanent corporate practice” from Mumbai to St. Petersburg, and from Silicon Valley to Istanbul and China.

Those were heady days, but fast forward to today. Sure, the language of innovation remains. But something has shifted. In conversations with executives, I increasingly hear a quiet question: Has the Innovation Movement stalled out?

Over breakfast at Boston’s storied Charles Hotel, I explored this possibility with Scott Kirsner, co-founder of InnoLead, a 1500-organization consortium of innovation practitioners, and a keen observer of the Movement since its inception. Scott’s take was blunt.

The AI Meteor

“The innovation movement is in a tough place,” he told me. “It feels like we’re wandering in the woods. Or like a meteor just hit.” The meteor, in his view, is AI.

When meteors strike, they expose those who can adapt and those who cannot or will not. Scott agreed that in many organizations today, innovation had lost its luster. It was embraced but never really embedded. More than a few early converts allowed it to become a department, a lab, a flavor of the month. It was funded in good times and quietly cut when pressures mounted.

Kirsner, just returned from a snowboarding trip in New Hampshire, described a familiar pattern: companies launch innovation teams, shut them down after a few years, and then restart them later. For many, innovation returned to being on-again/off-again, treated as a project rather than a capability.

Even before generative artificial intelligence hit like a meteor, the Movement began its fall from grace. It did not decline dramatically; it dissipated slowly over time. In some firms, it became performative—more about buzzwords than disciplined analysis of customer pain points and experimentation.

In recent years, innovation has become a meaningless buzzword, relegated to marketing hype. Interest in breakthrough new products, services, and business models has evaporated. These days, cost-cutting, risk management, and next quarter’s earnings dominate decision-making; risk-aversion is the new mantra.

The word innovation was co-opted by the bean counters and the marketers. In short, innovation has become a cover for profit extraction, rather than new value creation that benefits the customer. That was the central guiding principle of the Innovation Movement: you innovate to create new customer value. And you thereby capture some of that value in the form of profits for the effort.

Many executives don’t even use the word innovation anymore. They prefer to talk about growth. As Kirsner sees it, growth is harder to argue against. But this is largely a semantic change. Innovation was always a means to growth, as I described in ‘Driving Growth Through Innovation’ in 2001, through new products, services, partnerships, R&D discoveries, and new markets.

Another narrative has emerged that is now working against the Innovation Movement: that, as hard as they try, large companies cannot innovate internally. So why not save yourself the trouble and simply acquire startups?

This is a seductive argument—but one with flaws. The strongest companies do both, argues Kirsner. Google built Google Video before acquiring YouTube. The internal effort failed commercially but provided insight. Disney built its cruise business from scratch rather than buying into the market. These cases remind us that internal innovation is not obsolete. But it does require patience—something many organizations lack.

Persistent Innovators

Kirsner refers to the long-term devotees as “persistent innovators,” companies like Nike, LEGO, Novartis, and Google, where innovation is baked in their DNA, part of how they operate. In my own practice, I have long distinguished between the Discovery Engine and the Delivery Engine. Most companies are proficient at delivery, execution, efficiency, and scale. Far fewer truly understand or invest equally in discovery—scanning and monitoring the external and industry environments, experimenting, disrupting, and creating new markets for future growth. The companies that endure do both.

For all the hype, AI may be a helpful tool to innovators with the right mindset. Most important is what it removes: friction. One of the biggest barriers to innovation has always been the cost and time required to experiment. AI collapses that.

“If you have five ideas,” Kirsner noted, “you can [now] prototype all five.” Instead of building endless slide decks, teams can create tangible representations—a short video, a working model, a simulated experience. “The shift from telling to showing [that AI enables] is profound. It lowers the cost of learning.”

At the same time, AI may widen the gap between startups and large organizations. Startups adopt tools instantly. They experiment without permission. Large companies remain slowed by procurement cycles and internal constraints. By the time a tool is approved, it may already be outdated. The advantage is shifting to those who can act fastest, and to those with a well-oiled innovation process in place.

There is also the question of whether AI can truly innovate. Trained on the past, can it produce something genuinely new? Kirsner’s answer is pragmatic. Most innovation is combinatorial: recombining existing elements in new ways. The iPhone was not invented from scratch; it integrated existing technologies into something transformative. AI can assist in generating these combinations. But the human role remains central: framing problems, judging outputs, and deciding what matters are all areas where AI struggles.

So, where does this leave the Innovation Movement? Not dead certainly, but at an inflection point. Its first era was about persuasion, convincing leaders that innovation mattered. The next era will be about capability, embedding innovation into how organizations actually build a better future.

The meteor has struck. As Scott Kirsner sees it, what emerges from the dust will depend on who adapts, and who does not.

This article originally appeared in Forbes

Image credit: Pexels

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.