The Relevance Gap

Where innovation breaks

Most innovation fails not because of lack of ideas — but because organisations focus too much on themselves, and too little on what the world is becoming.

Author: Anne Flemmert Jensen, Ph.D.

Where innovation quietly breaks

There is one thing that consistently gets in the way of innovation:

We fall in love with our own ideas and forget that the world outside has moved on or simply see things differently.

I’ve seen this happen repeatedly over the years: Teams get absorbed in new technologies, new special features, or internal ambitions.

And slowly, almost invisibly, they lose sight of the one perspective that matters most:

• What does this actually mean for people?
• And what will it mean in one, two, or three years from now?

This is where innovation breaks. Because innovation is not driven by what you can build but by what becomes relevant in a changing world.

As Peter Drucker famously put it:

“The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells.”

The questions we don't ask

And yet, organisations often keep operating from the inside out:

• What do we want to achieve?
• What can we build?
• What fits our current strategy?

Instead of asking the harder, and far more valuable, questions:

• What is changing in people’s lives?
• What is the market becoming?
• And how do we create value in light of that?

Start where change happens

Clayton Christensen captured it simply: “Customers don’t buy products. They ‘hire’ them to do a job.”

But that “job” is not static. It evolves as people, contexts and expectations change.

This means your starting point cannot be your idea. It has to be the moving landscape around you.

A simple model for staying relevant

You can think of it as a three-step move:

Most organisations skip step 1 and 2. They jump straight to shaping. That’s where irrelevance begins.

Why It Matters

When you shift from inside-out to a future-focused outside-in perspective, something changes:

• Your ideas become more grounded
• Your strategy becomes more relevant
• Your innovation becomes more valuable

And most importantly: People feel it.

It's not rocket science. Actually it's just like any conversation you might have with a colleague, friend or neighbor:

Who is most interesting to engage with?

• The one who talks about themselves?
• Or the one who is genuinely curious about you and the world you live in?

Organisations are no different. The more you tune into what is unfolding beyond your walls, the more meaningful — and impactful — your decisions become.

Bottom line

The question is not: “What do we want to create?”

But: “What is the world becoming — and how do we become relevant within that?”

#strategy #innovation #future #customerinsight #businessdevelopment #leadership

Is your company ready to close the relevance gap?