Looking outward: why companies stop innovating (and how Gemini can help reopen that source)

When was the last time you brought in an idea from outside your organization?

I'm not talking about internal brainstorming, or that "let's think outside the box" meeting sitting in the same room, with the same people, looking at the same problems. I'm talking about an idea that actually came from outside.

If you got stuck trying to answer, you're not alone. I experience this myself leading projects at companies, alongside my peers and coworkers, it's a constant exercise.

Where innovation comes from

Innovation comes from almost everywhere, but, for the most part, it comes from outside organizations. Sometimes ideas come from customers, users, suppliers, partners and labs. I believe that, in most cases, we don't necessarily need a dedicated innovation department, but it's essential that leaders proactively and thoroughly seek out external sources and help their teams build that habit.

The starting point for imagining truly innovative alternatives is going beyond our usual patterns of thought. For that, we need to experiment and encourage people: seeing something in practice can shake things up far more than abstract discussions in a meeting room. That's why it's so important to promote exercises outside the office: trying out concepts from other companies, seeing how another sector or industry works.

Innovation demands close observation. It arises from relationships and connections across the widest range of contexts, and that requires constant interaction with the outside world. Encouraging interactions and the sharing of practices is one of the biggest sources of innovative ideas there is.

Why organizations stop innovating

Because, at some point, the organization ends up, without realizing it, strangling its own sources of new ideas, focusing only on internal processes.

In organizations, it's not uncommon for managers to drift away from important sources of information over time. I've been in environments where managers naturally became isolated, creating information silos, sometimes because the relationship itself faded due to that isolation. This usually comes from the effort to build an efficient operation, especially as pressure for results increases. By cutting budgets, we end up reducing important resources for training, travel and attending events, which would lead to new interactions. As a result, we end up interacting less and less with the outside world.

There are other factors that come along with these decisions. In the intent to cut expenses, we force suppliers to squeeze margins and give up essential agreements, moving into a transactional relationship with no partnership, no exchange of new ideas, no real cooperation.

When teams stay involved in the same routines for too long, isolated from outside influences, they end up drifting away from valuable sources of information and experience, exactly the sources needed to innovate.

The result ends up being competent, technically solid teams that solve the same problems the same way, year after year.

See, experiment, bring to life: the path back outward

An alternative for reopening these sources doesn't require an innovation budget line, hiring a consultancy, or creating a new department. It requires habit and example, and today, Gemini (or another AI assistant) significantly reduces the effort of putting that habit into practice.

See. You can create realistic images with Gemini and bring to life what's still only in your imagination. In fact, exploring imagination will be one of the great skills of this AI era: when AI makes it easier to put what's in someone's head into practice, whoever can imagine and bring it to life gets ahead. Before writing a technical report describing an idea, generate an image of it. That changes how the team sees the proposal and speeds up understanding for whoever needs to approve it.

Experiment. Use Gemini to create quick prototypes of a screen, a process or a conceptual mockup. You test, validate, show it, ask for the opinion of whoever's going to use it, "what would you do differently?", and if you don't like it, adjust and repeat in minutes, not weeks.

Bring to life. Turn a static idea into a video to present it in perspective. Aligned vision is a fundamental step for any major achievement, and seeing something in motion communicates far more than a bullet-point list on a slide.

Bringing the outside world into your project

Beyond seeing and experimenting, there's a second move: actively seeking out what's happening out there.

We don't need to travel a thousand miles to learn about another company's work process. Use Google Meet and propose a virtual tour with a partner, supplier, or even a competitor from another sector.

Want to understand how other industries solve a problem similar to yours? Use Gemini's Deep Research to dig deeply into that process, without spending your whole day digging through article after article.

Ask Gemini to connect topics from completely different contexts, even if they seem counterintuitive. Ask how one could help the other. Many times, the best solution for our project already exists, just in a different sector.

Inside your own company, encourage cross-team challenges. Use Google Sites to promote the initiative and Google Forms to collect ideas. Then take those responses, which automatically land in a spreadsheet, and cross-reference them with each other. Isolated ideas often complete each other when placed side by side.

The language barrier isn't an excuse anymore either. In Meet, you can turn on real-time translation. We have a lot of Brazilians working abroad, why not ask a contact in your network to present the work process of the company where they are, and notice how they think and do things differently from us.

The habit that sustains all of this

This doesn't work as a one-off action. Set a ritual, it can be weekly, to seek out sources of new ideas and open yourself up to new conversations, removing the isolation.

Seeing and experimenting is far more effective than abstract discussion in a meeting room. And today, with the tools we already have available, many of them free, the cost of seeing and experimenting has dropped a lot.

The question isn't whether we have the resources to look outward anymore. It's whether we're going to keep putting off that habit.

If this topic speaks to you, you might also like this article where I talk about how to encourage collaboration on your projects: collaboration and openness to the outside world go hand in hand.

Take care!

Leandro | Project and PMO Manager