Untitled Newsroom Article

MIT Sloan Management Review dedicated a chunk of its Spring 2026 issue to strategic innovation. Three separate research pieces tackle the same question from different angles: why do smart companies with good products still fail at innovation?

The answer won’t surprise coaches. It’s not the strategy. It’s the people.

Salespeople who freeze because they fear looking incompetent. Leaders who let innovation programs die by shifting attention back to quarterly results. Governance structures that crush the psychological safety needed for experimentation. Every one of these barriers sits squarely in the coaching domain. And most coach training programs don’t address any of them directly.

Why Innovation Stalls (And What It Has to Do with Coaching)

Researchers Bianca Schmitz, Olaf Plötner, and Johannes Habel found that when companies launch radical innovations, sales pipelines stall. Not because customers resist the product. Because salespeople worry they’ll look incompetent discussing something unfamiliar. They avoid the conversation entirely.

A separate piece by Gina O’Connor and Christopher Meyer in MIT Sloan Management Review identifies what makes some mature companies sustain innovation while others lose it: a permanent innovation practice backed by strategic commitment. Most companies start strong and then drift back to protecting existing product lines. The innovation function gets starved.

Constanze Coelsch-Foisner and Fiona Murray add a structural dimension. Venture studios can drive corporate innovation, but only with the right governance, resources, and sustained executive commitment. Without those, studios become expensive experiments that die quietly.

Notice the pattern. Fear of incompetence is an identity problem. Drifting commitment is a leadership problem. Governance that stifles experimentation is a psychological safety problem. These aren’t problems that better strategy documents solve. They’re problems that coaching solves.

Three Innovation Competencies Coach Training Programs Miss

Identity resilience in uncertainty. The salesperson who avoids pitching a radical innovation isn’t lazy or unskilled. They’re protecting their professional identity. They’ve built a reputation as someone who knows their product cold, and radical innovation strips that away. A coach who understands this pattern can help the person separate their competence from their knowledge of a specific product. That’s identity work, and most coach training covers it in personal contexts. Innovation contexts require the same skill deployed differently.

Sustaining commitment through ambiguity. O’Connor and Meyer’s research makes a point most coaches will recognize: organizations abandon innovation not because it fails but because the uncertainty becomes uncomfortable. Leaders redirect resources toward safer bets. Coaches working with innovation leaders need tools to help them stay with ambiguity without rushing to premature closure. That means moving beyond goal-setting frameworks and into the territory of holding tension.

Governance coaching for innovation structures. Venture studios and innovation labs need more than process frameworks. They need the kind of psychological safety that allows people to propose ideas that might not work, challenge assumptions without career risk, and make decisions under genuine uncertainty. Coaches trained in group dynamics and multi-level listening are well positioned here, but only if they understand the innovation context well enough to ask the right questions.

How to Build These Skills Into Your Practice

If you’re a coach or in a training program now, there are concrete ways to build innovation-context competency. Building on essential coaching skills, innovation context adds a layer most programs skip.

Read the business research. MIT Sloan, Harvard Business Review, and similar publications surface the human problems behind strategy failures. Every issue contains coaching opportunities hiding in plain sight. You don’t need an MBA. You need pattern recognition for where strategy language masks a coaching problem.

Practice distinguishing strategy problems from identity problems. When a client says “our innovation pipeline is stalled,” the coaching question isn’t about the pipeline. It’s about what the stall means for the people in it. Get comfortable naming that distinction.

Strengthen the competencies that apply directly. The ICF core competency model already includes evoking awareness and facilitating growth. In innovation contexts, evoking awareness means helping clients see that their resistance to a new initiative might be identity protection, not strategic judgment. Facilitating growth means supporting them as they step into unfamiliar territory without a guaranteed outcome.

The business world is producing research that validates what coaches already know: the hardest organizational problems are people problems. The question is whether coach training keeps pace.