Despite bookshelves bending under the weight of 100 authors telling us how to unlock better innovation performance, the past 20 years have not delivered the desired uptick in project success rates. CEOs and innovation leaders I talk with report success rates across companies and verticals that seem stuck at the same ~10% rate we saw years ago.

The problem isn’t theory, process, or organizational structure. It’s something altogether human: the struggle to find and unleash bona fide black belt innovators to do the actual work.

Black belt innovators are a rare breed with a cluster of signature traits. A quirk of brain wiring that spots patterns instantly. The vision to know the difference between a gap in the market and a market in the gap. The recognition that process is a means to an end—to be hacked as needed, not held sacrosanct. Reflexive instincts for differentiation, design, and storytelling. Strategic acumen joined at the hip with creative bravery. An obsession with threading the needle between human needs and business needs. The ability to look at 100 early-stage ideas on a whiteboard, jump up on the table, and say, “That’s the one.” And enough scar tissue from a hundred laps around the track to know what it takes to get a big idea through the gauntlet to fruition.

The cost of failing to find and unleash these black belts has been massive—especially now, when this should be a golden age for corporate innovation.

Innovation black belts in corporate roles were always in short supply. Then four forces converged to make it worse.

1. A surge in demand spread black belts thin

In the early 2000s, CEOs across every vertical realized innovation was no longer a sideshow but a mission-critical lever of growth and survival. Almost overnight, well-funded innovation teams, labs, incubators, accelerators, and venturing arms took flight, creating demand that the finite black belt supply couldn’t meet.

2. A new talent pool emerged

Before the surge, only the obsessives were drawn to innovation—people who didn’t just tolerate failure and wild ambiguity but were addicted to it. The surge brought new, purely rational motivations: a growing field, a sought-after skill set, a hot buzzword for the résumé. Academia cooperated, turning out graduates fluent in innovation vocabulary and processes, but underequipped with the electric synapses, observational superpowers, and innate inventiveness that separate black belts from the merely innovation curious.

3. Innovators were promoted to managers

Black belt innovators were star performers, so they were promoted to managers and became distant from front-line work. In innovation, this comes at a steep price. The best front-line innovators get rewarded by being pulled further from the work they do better than anyone else. You can’t backfill a black belt with someone who can draw the process on a whiteboard.

4. Venture studios emerged as black belt magnets

Black belt innovators were seduced by a new wave of venture studios offering greater autonomy, entrepreneurial culture, proximity to the actual work, and comp tied to ownership rather than moving up a corporate ladder.

Innovation talent squandered twice

Frustrated CEOs bankrolled an innovation surge but didn’t see a worthy return on investment. Scores of corporate innovation labs were shuttered. Not because innovation was overhyped or underfunded, but because these organizations lacked the superstars capable of unearthing hidden needs in the market, making the conceptual and technological leaps to meet them, and relentlessly executing with bravery and excellence. 

As big corporations sputtered with internal resources, they turned to pure-play innovation strategy and design firms—black belts on demand. That ecosystem flourished. Then, traditional consultancies and agency groups, sensing CEO angst over weak innovation performance, went on a decade-long acquisition spree, snapping up leading innovation firms like IDEO, Frog, Fahrenheit 212, Doblin, Innosight, Bow & Arrow, ?WhatIf!, and a dozen more.

Predictably, once the buyout checks cleared, the best black belts in those firms headed for the exits, dodging culture clash, bureaucracy, and attempts to industrialize their uniquely human skills. Most of those firms, decades in the building, are now a fraction of their former size, limping on in name only or gone altogether.

Here are three ways companies can find and retain more black belt innovators for the road ahead.

1. Change how you hire innovation talent

So many candidates today know the vocabulary, are process-literate, and have been part of teams that did good things. Separating the drivers from the passengers requires giving candidates tasks that reveal how their brains work. Make them create something genuinely original and pitch it to you. Stop relying on impressive CVs and polished spiels.

2. Keep your best innovators innovating

If career progression and compensation require your best innovators to become people managers and step away from day-to-day work, nothing will change. Give these rare rockstars their own well-rewarded career path—where status and comp reflect the leaps they make, not the headcount they oversee.

3. Rethink how you vet outside help

With every major innovation firm having gone through the M&A blender, limit your evaluation to the actual work of the people who would work on your project—not legacy case studies from long gone founders.

Closing thoughts

Hindsight says that for all the ink thrown at sharpening innovation processes and the cash thrown at projects, the black belt talent gap is the missing link holding back ROI. The road to better outcomes isn’t about bigger budgets or bolder mission statements, but solving this human thing by hiring for proof instead of polish, letting your best innovators stay where they’re most dangerous—close to the work—and judging outside firms by the hands actually on your project, not the names on the door.

Do those things to find and keep black belts, and those 10% innovation success rates will head north. Skip them, and you’re just funding the next generation of shuttered labs.

Mark Payne is CEO and cofounder of Electric Innovation.