In summary:
- Exploration involves purposeful experimentation to uncover new value — through identifying opportunities, generating ideas, prototyping, and validating concepts
- Exploration is not just about creativity but about strategically reducing risk and learning through iteration, focusing on idea generation, testing, and learning—guided by ISO 56000 principles and enabled by psychological safety and strategic alignment
- Successful exploration requires strong leadership, while context shapes where to focus innovation efforts, and a strong culture encourages curiosity, collaboration, and learning from failure
In today’s unpredictable world, innovation is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a strategic imperative. As explored in ‘Is it time to kill the innovation Is it time to kill the innovation department?”, traditional innovation structures are being turned on their head. Innovation is no longer the job of a select few, it’s becoming everyone's responsibility—embedded into everyday decisions, championed by leadership, and powered by culture, context and collaboration.
At the heart of this shift lies exploration—the critical early phase of the innovation process where ideas are born, shaped, and tested. According to the ISO ISO 56000 series on Innovation Management, this phase involves idea generation, opportunity identification, and validation—all requiring creativity, curiosity, and courage.
In this blog, we explore how to create a fertile environment for exploration, drawing from the ISO 56000 principles and insights into leadership, context, and culture. We'll look at how organisations can unlock new opportunities by empowering individuals to think beyond the obvious, take smart risks, and collaborate across boundaries.
Unlike execution—which is about doing things right—exploration is about asking, “Are we doing the right things?”
Understanding exploration in innovation management
The ISO 56000 series defines innovation as a new or changed entity that realises or redistributes value. This definition emphasises that innovation is not just about creating something new, but also about the value that is created or redistributed as a result of that new or changed entity.
Exploration, therefore, is not aimless brainstorming – it's purposeful experimentation aimed at discovering ideas with the potential to solve unmet needs, address future trends, or disrupt the status quo.
This phase involves:
- Identifying problems or opportunities,
- Generating a wide range of ideas,
- Deciding whether to build it internally, or enter into partnerships with ecosystem players,
- Assessing feasibility and potential value, and
- Prototyping and validating concepts.
While this sounds methodical, exploration is often messy. It demands space where uncertainty is okay, and where people are encouraged to learn from what doesn’t work. That’s where good leadership, context, and culture come into play.
When done well, exploration gives you the evidence you need to make smarter decisions. It’s not about avoiding risk—it’s about reducing it through learning, testing, and improving as you go.
Leadership: enabling safe risk-taking
In ’ Leading the way: Empowering leadership in innovation management’, we highlight a fundamental truth: leadership is not about commanding innovation; it’s about creating the conditions where innovation can thrive.
Exploration requires psychological safety. People must feel safe to voice wild ideas, challenge assumptions, and take risks without fear of consequences. Leaders must role-model this behaviour by celebrating experimentation and reframing failure as a source of insight.
More than that, leaders should empower teams by providing autonomy and access to the tools, data, and time needed for creative exploration. This decentralisation aligns perfectly with ISO 56000’s principle of shared innovation responsibility and inclusive participation.
Effective leaders also bring clarity of purpose. By articulating a compelling vision and aligning exploration activities with organisational goals, they ensure that innovation efforts are not just creative, but strategically relevant. Without strategic alignment the odds for going from a good idea to realisation and value creation looks bad.
This is where leadership plays a crucial role—not in controlling outcomes, but in protecting the space for teams to test and adapt. Leaders must shift the question from “Did it work?” to “What did we learn” providing them with the answer to “How will this enable competitive advantage” in terms of cost reduction, automatisation, sustainability or growth.
Context: shaping the space for innovation
Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. As discussed in ‘Setting the stage: Understanding the context of innovation management’, the success of innovation efforts is deeply influenced by internal and external factors. This includes market trends, customer needs, technological shifts, regulatory landscapes, and even organisational structure and maturity.
With the pace of transformation, the exploration phase should be informed by context. That means staying alert to signs of change and always looking for new opportunities. It means using customer insight, competitor analysis, and foresight right at the start of the idea process.
But what’s happening inside the organisation matters too. What can we do right now? What’s helping us move forward - and what’s holding us back in terms of time, people or tools?
Context acts as a compass. It helps teams deal with uncertainty, understand the constraints which bound them and focus their creative energy where it can have the most impact.
Culture: the engine of exploration
Culture is arguably the most critical enabler—or barrier—to exploration. As explored in ’ Shaping the future: How culture drives innovation management’, a strong innovation culture is one where curiosity, collaboration, and experimentation are not just encouraged but expected. But let’s face it, our DNA is programmed to search for stability and control. Over thousands of years this has simply been a survival instinct. But again; innovation is about changing, creating value and doing things in a new and better way.
A culture that supports exploration has several key characteristics:
- Openness to new ideas and perspectives, including from outside the organisation.
- Respect for diversity, not just in demographics but in thinking styles, disciplines, and experiences.
- Incentives that reward initiative, learning, and progress rather than just results.
- Structures that allow for flexible teaming, fast feedback loops, and agile experimentation.
This kind of culture doesn’t emerge overnight. It must be built on purpose, with clear support from leadership, regular communication, and strong backing through hiring, onboarding, recognition, and performance reviews.
Importantly, culture should align with context and leadership. A risk-averse organisation in a highly regulated sector might approach exploration differently than a startup in an emerging tech field—but both can create space for innovation within their own frameworks.
How can organisations put these principles into action?
Here are a few practical steps to foster effective exploration:
1. Build collaborative spaces for fresh thinking
Break down silos and bring together diverse voices to generate fresh ideas. Use hackathons, innovation challenges, or workshops to engage people from different backgrounds.
2. Adopt a portfolio approach
Not every idea needs to be a moonshot. Manage a balanced portfolio of innovation efforts—from incremental improvements to radical experiments—to spread risk and sustain momentum.
3. Invest in innovation capabilities
Provide training on creative problem solving, lean experimentation, and user-centred design. Equip teams with tools and spaces to collaborate and prototype.
4. Build feedback and validation loops
Engage customers, partners, and internal stakeholders early and often. Use Minimum Viable Products (a basic working version of a solution), mock-ups, or pilots to test and adapt quickly.
5. Measure what matters
During exploration, focus on learning metrics—like number of ideas generated, hypotheses tested, or customer insights gained—rather than short-term ROI.
Principles in action
Northumbria Water Group champion these principles through their annual Innovation Festival. Held at Newcastle Race Course, the festival is an annual event that brings together innovators to collaboratively tackle pressing challenges in the water industry and beyond. Through dynamic workshops, sprints, and collaborative sessions, participants co-create solutions aimed at driving sustainable and impactful change.
“Our Innovation Festival is proof that collaboration delivers results. 3,000 people. 900 organisations. 40 countries. 60 breakthrough ideas each year. We bring diverse minds together to solve real problems.” Nigel Watson, Northumbria Water Group
Exploration as a strategic muscle
In a world where competitive advantage is increasingly short-lived, the ability to explore the unknown and discover new sources of value is more critical than ever. ISO 56000 provides a valuable framework to guide this process, but it’s not a checklist—it’s a mindset.
Exploration must be strategic, inclusive, and deliberately nurtured through the interplay of leadership, context, and culture. By doing so, organisations can unlock not just new products or services, but entirely new ways of thinking, working, and growing.
Innovation is no longer the job of a few—it’s the responsibility of all. And exploration is where it all begins.
Explore more about Innovation Management and Open Innovation here.