Sticky notes. Funky furniture. Job titles with “innovation” in them. Most corporate innovation efforts look the part — until you try to build something real.
At the mesh conference in Calgary, that tension took centre stage.
The mesh conference has been bringing people together across business, media, society, and technology (quite literally “meshing” these groups together) to explore how innovation is changing how we live and work since 2006. The event is held twice a year, once in Calgary and once in Toronto.
Running at Platform Calgary April 29 and 30, mesh leans into practical, often uncomfortable conversations about what actually moves the needle. One session that embodied that spirit was “The Corporate Innovation Playbook,” led by strategist and leadership coach Tina Mathas, with help from Mike Procee, Shannon Phillips, and Shannon Dougall.
Instead of celebrating sticky-note workshops and idea sessions that never go anywhere, the discussion went after the sacred cows of corporate innovation — and offered a more realistic playbook for leaders who actually want to get things done.
Mathas opened the session by laying out four hard truths that, in her words, often get lost inside large organizations:
- Creativity is not innovation.
- We need to create more than we consume.
- Not everyone can innovate.
- Tension, not harmony, powers real innovation.
Each of these ideas challenged familiar assumptions — and set the stage for a frank conversation about why innovation so often fails to move past good intentions.
Killing the myth of “innovation labs”
Mathas opened the session with a direct hit: “Most corporate innovation dies.” And not because companies lack ideas.
“Companies are built to protect the past, not invent the future,” she said.
She says one of the biggest culprits is “innovation labs” that have the atmosphere of change without the outcomes.
When asked whether these labs deliver real results or just expensive optics, Mike Procee of the Calgary Innovation Peer Forum acknowledged the criticism.
“Most innovation labs are expensive Design Thinking groups,” he said, but argued they can still serve a purpose.
“I’m a big fan of innovation theatre,” he added. “Inspiring people to think differently is often the seed that starts these things.”
Phillips, co-founder and director of Unbounded Thinking, took a firmer stance, cautioning against copying other companies’ innovation playbooks without a clear purpose. Setting up a lab just because another organization has one, he said, is a recipe for failure — especially without a strategy grounded in the company’s own needs.
Dougall, a senior marketing and growth advisor who has worked with companies like Shopify and Klue, cut right to the problem: “I think that companies are building these really amazing creative spaces, which is awesome, but I think that they’re forgetting to build that structure in order for it to become a scalable value for the company.”
The consensus? Atmosphere without ownership, leadership support, and real integration into the business is just an expensive theatre production.
Creativity is not the same as innovation
Early in the session, Mathas addressed a common misconception: that creativity and innovation are interchangeable.
“Creativity is necessary, but it’s not enough,” she said.
In her view, creativity is about seeing patterns, connecting ideas, and imagining new possibilities — but innovation is about execution.
“Innovation is taking creative ideas and delivering real value to people,” she explained. “It’s execution with excellence.”
One of the biggest barriers to creativity in corporate settings, she said, is cognitive overload. With Slack messages, emails, meetings, and KPIs coming from all directions, there’s often no space to think deeply or explore ideas.
“You cannot multitask thinking,” she said. “You have to have quiet, you have to have no distractions in order to be able to create.”
Creating space for innovative thinking was also a key takeaway from Digital Journal’s national research findings.
Her challenge to the room was simple: “In the last week, how many hours did you spend creating something new versus responding to stuff?”
The silence that followed made her point pretty clear.
Pirates, soldiers, and the real anatomy of an innovation team
Mathas also tore apart the idea that anyone with a “creative mindset” should automatically be drafted into innovation work.
“Before you start building innovation teams, ask, Am I staffing pirates or soldiers?” she said. “You need the pirates first and the soldiers second, because pirates break the rules — ethically.”
A healthy innovation team, according to Mathas, needs pirates (rule-breakers and idea generators), builders (the ones who actually build and execute), and navigators (translators who bridge both worlds). Keeping teams small — five to eight people — and protecting them from bureaucracy early was another must.
More one the role that pirates play here.
“Reward impact, not optics,” she said. “Don’t reward the fact that you had an ideation session. Who cares?”
Phillips agreed, adding that companies often need to rethink their internal power dynamics if they want innovation to succeed.
“If we need to bring innovation into a company, you have to flip that,” he said. “The strategy and values [should be] coming from the frontline and from customers — and the executive become those that enable that creativity.”
What counts as real innovation (hint: it’s not just improving what’s already there)
Before the debate kicked off, Tina Mathas walked through what she sees as one of the biggest barriers to meaningful innovation in large organizations: a misunderstanding of what innovation actually is.
She challenged the popular Gartner innovation quadrant — especially the idea that “core” and “adjacent” efforts should be lumped in with disruptive innovation. “Core is incremental improvements to process or existing products,” she said. “And adjacent is finding new value or new markets for an existing product.”
In her view, those are examples of optimization or continuous improvement — not innovation.
“Continuous improvement makes the old thing better,” Mathas said. “Innovation makes the old thing obsolete.”
She defined true innovation as transformative, disruptive, and market-creating.
“It’s about that transformative, that disruptive product,” she said. “Creating a new way of being, attending to a need that we didn’t even know that we had.”
That framework set the stage for a lively debate among the panelists about whether companies should embrace a broader view of innovation, or defend a stricter definition.
Dougall shared her “three horizons of growth” model, reserving the term innovation for work that is “separate from the existing business today.” Changes to pricing models or go-to-market strategies, she said, are important — but they’re not transformative.
Procee offered a counterpoint grounded in corporate reality. “I prefer a little bit of a broader definition that lets everybody come in,” he said, noting that recognizing incremental improvements as part of an innovation portfolio can help reduce the “us versus them mentality” that often surfaces between innovation teams and the rest of the business.
At the same time, he reinforced the importance of friction and persistence.
“You have to get a lot of excitement from the small little wins from the innovation theater,” he said. “With persistence… even the largest organizations can show disruptive innovation and growth.”
Takeaways for leaders who actually want results
For leaders and teams serious about avoiding the innovation graveyard, the session offered some clear takeaways:
- Hire “pirates” first, but bring “soldiers” along later to scale ideas.
- Keep innovation teams small, diverse, and protected from bureaucracy.
- Build tension between creative and operational mindsets instead of smoothing it over.
- Separate true innovation efforts from the core business structure.
- Reward execution, not idea generation.
- Check your company values: “If you want to know if your company truly believes in innovation, it’ll be called out in their values,” said Mathas.
True innovation is messy. It does not happen because a team booked a brainstorming session or decorated a new office space. It happens when companies are willing to protect new ideas long enough to turn them into real outcomes — and when leaders are willing to create the conditions for risk, failure, and learning.
It is not easy. It is not instant. And it does not happen by accident.
As Mathas reminded the room, the real question is not how many sticky notes you filled or workshops you attended.
The real question is simultaneously much simpler and much harder, but she asked it to the room at large:
“What will you create this week?”
