Editor's note: Julie Averill is the former vice president and global chief information officer at lululemon, where she led the technology transformation that grew the company's revenue from $2 billion to more than $10 billion.
As we scale up [lululemon]the pressure to innovate faster has increased. New features, new markets, new guest experiences. The demands were relentless.
Conventional wisdom says you need to create an innovation team. Provide space independent of operating pressure. Let them explore new technologies without being constrained by production systems.
So we tried it. We created a small team and gave them great freedom of thought. There are no quarterly delivery targets. There are no operational responsibilities. Just pure innovation.
Within a few months, problems surfaced. The innovation team builds something promising that could not be integrated because the operations team was not involved. Or maybe it solves a problem that the company has already deprioritized for good reason. The operations team felt like innovation was happening to them. The innovation team felt fired.
We realized that the people running the business were just as innovative as the “innovation team.” They were just buried under operational pressures without permission to raise their heads and think differently.
We disbanded our independent innovation team.
Instead, we started asking different questions in interviews. We designed it to reveal curiosity, ownership, collaboration style, and confrontational approach. Do you naturally see a problem and start thinking about how to solve it? How do you work with people who think differently than you?
Because if you hire curious problem solvers and then bury them in the process without giving them time to think, you're wasting their value in the first place.
The truly liberating innovation wasn't the framework. It was about hiring people who cared about the problem and creating an environment where they felt comfortable experimenting. That created ownership.
That meant keeping time for exploration. That meant celebrating the smart failures as loudly as the successes. I meant when someone said, “What if we tried this completely different approach?” The answer wasn't “that's not the way we do it”, it was “let's test it”.
Breakthrough ideas don't come from separate innovation labs. They came from an engineer who managed our implementation process for two years and finally got permission to completely rethink it. From a product manager who knew our guests better than anyone and was trusted to try something unconventional. A message from a data scientist who has worked on business teams for a long time and understands what problems need to be solved.
When people own a problem, they innovate solutions. You can't give someone else's great idea to your team and expect them to get the same commitment when they discovered it.
Innovation is no longer a separate function. It's what happened naturally when curious people had trust, time, and permission to solve problems differently.
I'm seeing companies making this mistake with AI right now. They have established an “AI Center of Excellence” separate from operations and are staffing it with experts. But AI is not something that experts do while others carry on with their business. This is what problem solvers use when they have the space and support to ask, “Can this tool help me solve this problem better?”
It’s not the company with the most luxurious innovation lab that wins; They hire curious people, build trust, and give them permission to rethink how they do work.
Great innovations don't happen in isolation. It happens when you trust the people doing the work to find a better way.
Adapted from chief impact officerpublished by 8080 Books. Copyright © 2026. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.
