Let’s Be Honest: Innovation Is Broken. Time to Think Like a Chief Problem Officer

As I speak to more innovation leaders, I learn here’s no shortage of ideas but there’s often a shortage of well-defined, prioritized, clearly communicated challenge statements.

In reality? The best innovation programs don’t start with ideas. The real reason I see so many good ideas fail to make it into production at scale is often because they moved too far without a clearly defined challenge statement.

Is it time that we started thinking about the innovation leader as the Chief Problem Officer?

Leading with Problems vs. Being Led by Solutions

Too often, innovation teams are led by their inboxes, “bright ideas” by vendor demos, or by “cool tech” they don’t have the time or budget to evaluate.

But leading innovation means:

• Asking better questions, not just generating more ideas

• Framing problems clearly so others can contribute meaningfully

• Prioritizing challenges based on what matters to your customers and your operations

The innovation leader needs to think more like a Chief Problem Officer to drive that clarity across the organization. They don’t just ask “What should we do?” They ask:

“What’s the biggest obstacle to delivering value right now—and how do we fix it?”

Want Better Outcomes? Write Better Challenge Statements.

Our AI in InnovationWorks is trained to do just that—turning unstructured data from public filings, strategy documents, customer feedback, test plan, research documents into clear, actionable challenges that teams can solve.

But you don’t need AI to start thinking like a Chief Problem Officer. You just need a shift in mindset.

Start with this simple structure to form a clear challenge statement:

“Our utility needs [CAPABILITY] in order to [BENEFIT].”

Example:

“We need an electric fleet monitoring management software in order to prevent transformer overloading.”

That one sentence could be the spark for your next great pilot—and more importantly, a measurable result for your customers.

Lead Innovation. Don’t Follow It.

If your innovation program is spinning its wheels, it might not be a resource problem. It might just be a problem problem.

Lead with challenges. Drive clarity. Create the space for your organization to deliver real outcomes.

Because in today’s climate, innovation without impact is just noise. And no one has time for that anymore.

Success = Chasing the Right Problems.

At InnovationForce, we’ve helped our customers shift their innovation programs to targeted challenge-driven execution.

Here’s what we’ve learned:

✅ Start with a clearly defined challenge 

✅ Connect it to an operational or customer pain point,

✅ Run it through a structured process that defines test plans and success metrics

You get results. Fast.

For example, according to their recently shared and publicly available Innovation Impact report, Portland General Electric now greenlights over 50% of their pilots into scaled production.

That’s nearly unheard of. And it’s possible because they flipped the model—starting with the challenge, not the idea.

Curious how to operationalize a challenge-based innovation approach like PGE? Book a meeting with me to learn more about our Fast Track program – its intelligently designed to kickstart your innovation approach around solving problems and delivers impact in weeks, not months or years.