Unseen Innovation: The Hidden Gems Beyond the Pipeline

Innovation isn’t always loud - it’s often buried in the quiet work no one’s tracking.

I had a moment this week—the kind that sneaks up on you one mild Tuesday afternoon while you're knee-deep in frameworks and KPIs.

I was heads-down redesigning our innovation decision process when a colleague hit me with a deceptively simple question:
“How many ideas do you think will never go through the pipeline?”

It stopped me cold. Not because I didn’t have an answer—because I’d forgotten to even ask the question.

It reminded me of an old product management insight: real growth often comes not from optimising for your current users, but from understanding the people who aren’t using your product at all.

And just like that, it clicked.
In innovation, we obsess over pipelines. Stages and gates. Charts. KPIs.
But what about the quiet, scrappy ideas that never make it into the system?
The ones that slowly shape how we work, chip away at inefficiencies, or quietly spark a better way of doing things?

These are the grassroots moves. The micro-innovations. The invisible momentum.
And if we’re not careful, we design entire systems that ignore the people behind them.

After that conversation, we started talking differently.
Not about processes, but about non-users of our process—people already making change, just without a formal platform.

We asked: What would it look like to support them?

Here’s where we landed:

• A tactical innovation playbook for people who want to start without asking for permission.

• Bite-sized learning modules to build confidence and capability, fast.

• Recognition that extends beyond shiny projects and celebrates everyday wins.

We already offer facilitation, value stream mapping, and rewards—but maybe it’s time to widen the net.

Let’s build systems that notice the invisible work. Because sometimes, the most meaningful change never makes it onto a slide deck.