Internal innovation teams are everywhere these days. And for good reason: who better to spot opportunities, propose smarter systems, or dream up the next big thing than the people already working inside your company?
But in our work with clients, we’ve seen a discouraging pattern: internal innovation teams get stood up with excitement only to stall out months later.
At this year’s Energy Tech 2025 conference, Powered by Dominion Energy, Shane Diller and Bruce Ferris—both owners at SPARK Product Development—talked about why so many internal innovation teams stall out, and what organizations can do to fix it.
Why internal innovation teams rarely work
The innovation bottleneck is real.
We’ve worked with product companies across energy, infrastructure, and beyond. Over and over, we see promising innovation teams lose steam. Not because the ideas are bad, but because the system surrounding those ideas is broken.
Here are a few of the most common roadblocks:
Everyone has a day job. Most innovation team members are volunteering on top of their full-time responsibilities. That makes it hard to prioritize follow-through.
Too many ideas, not enough filters. With no clear criteria for what makes a good idea, innovation teams can get flooded with half-baked suggestions and end up stuck trying to triage them all.
Gatekeepers slow things down. When one person or team is tasked with vetting every idea, momentum stalls and frustration builds.
No clear path forward. Even great ideas can fizzle if there's no defined process for getting them funded, resourced, and prototyped.
Internal innovation is not only worth the effort, it’s essential. But if you want it to actually work, the focus has to shift.
What great innovators do differently
If you want innovation to thrive, you need more than inspiration. You need infrastructure.
At SPARK, we work with internal product teams and innovation leaders to help them move faster and smarter.
Based on that work, here are some of the best practices we recommend:
Define your filters. What qualifies as a viable idea? What stage does it need to reach before being pitched? A clear rubric saves time and builds confidence.
Make due diligence a habit. Encourage teams to think through competitors, cost of inaction, regulatory hurdles, development costs, and internal politics early on.
Know your resourcing model. Can you spin up rapid prototypes? Do you have a path for getting budget or technical support? Innovation dies without follow-through.
Create feedback loops. Nobody likes to have their idea criticized, but ideas improve with friction. Teach teams to welcome questions and critique, and give them a process to iterate.
Track momentum. If your innovation pipeline gets stuck at the same stage over and over, that’s a signal. Pay attention to where things slow down.
Innovation programs can work. They just need the right scaffolding.
Want help getting your team unstuck or designing an innovation model that actually delivers? SPARK can help. Let’s talk.