Treat innovation like your health: Why most investments come too late

Smart innovation isn’t about more money. It’s about better timing.

This article was inspired by a presentation that visualized the cost curve of healthcare—showing how expenses skyrocket in the late, lethal stages of illness and life. The insight was simple, but striking: while not every disease or accident can be prevented, we vastly overspend in the final phase and underspend on early detection and prevention.

So the question arises: Do we do the same with our business models? Are we waiting too long—spending too much—when it's already too late?

Most companies treat innovation like a visit to the emergency room: reactive, expensive, and often incapable of reversing the decline. But just like with our bodies, the most impactful work happens long before the crisis hits.

Let’s explore why so many innovation efforts fail—not because of a lack of ambition, but because they’re started in the wrong phase of the lifecycle. And how a mindset shift from "fixing what’s broken" to "sustaining what’s vital" could be one of the smartest investments your business makes.

Innovation as emergency room: Why we spend more when it hurts most

When a company’s core business shows signs of stress—shrinking margins, aggressive competition, or shifts in customer behavior—the natural response is to pump money into innovation. Launch new initiatives. Restructure. Hire consultants.

But just like waiting until you’re sick to start living healthy, this approach is reactive. And it carries three major risks:

• High cost with low impact: At this stage, problems are entrenched. The business is locked into systems, incentives, and expectations that resist change.

• Time pressure: Innovation needs exploration, learning, iteration. But in crisis mode, there's no time for that—only quick fixes.

• Cognitive bias: In high-stress moments, we’re less open to radical ideas. We default to protecting the known instead of exploring the possible.

Late-stage innovation is like open-heart surgery. Necessary, perhaps—but painful, risky, and a result of not acting sooner.

Vitality vs. survival: A shift in mindset

In health, we’ve learned that prevention is better than cure. Regular check-ups, small adjustments, healthy habits. Not because we're sick—but to stay resilient.

What if we treated business innovation the same way?

• Start before it hurts: The most valuable innovations emerge when a business is still healthy, because that’s when you can afford to experiment.

• Build adaptive muscles: Like fitness, innovation requires regular practice—exploring customer jobs, testing assumptions, launching small bets.

• See signals, not noise: Weak signals today become tomorrow’s crisis. But you can only detect them if you’re paying attention early.

Most companies aren’t dying. They’re drifting. Slowly, silently. Not from one big disruption, but from thousands of small ones they failed to notice.

The innovation lifecycle vs. the health lifecycle

Let’s make the comparison explicit:

Why do organizations wait so long?

Despite knowing all this, most leaders still fall into the same trap. Why?

• Success blindness: When things are going well, no one wants to rock the boat. So weak signals get dismissed as noise.

• Financial logic: Early-stage innovation lacks ROI. It’s hard to quantify prevention. CFOs prefer data over hunches.

• Organisational friction: Early exploration challenges internal priorities. It rarely fits neatly into the org chart.

But here’s the irony: what feels safe now creates risk later. By the time innovation becomes urgent, you’ve already lost your flexibility.

How to invest like a preventive thinker

If you buy the health metaphor, the next question is: how do you actually operationalize it?

Here’s a starting point:

• Set an “Innovation Health Budget” Allocate a fixed % of resources to early-stage exploration—before you “need” it.

• Run regular “Business Model Check-Ups” Review how well your value proposition still matches evolving customer jobs. Look for symptoms of decay.

• Track weak signals Assign people to scan for behavior changes, fringe competitors, or shifts in adjacent industries.

• Invest in capability, not just outcomes Innovation is not a project. It’s a system. Fund internal learning, experimentation, and customer closeness.

• Normalize discomfort early Change is always uncomfortable. Better to practise discomfort in low-stakes settings than wait until survival is on the line.

A new metric: Return on Innovation (ROIN)

We measure financial health. We measure efficiency. But very few companies track vitality—the ability to adapt, learn, and renew.

What if we treated adaptability as a leading KPI—just like we track blood pressure or heart rate?

You may include metrics like:

• % of revenue from new business models (last 3 years)

• Time from idea to test

• Frequency of customer co-creation activities

• of assumptions tested per quarter

These aren’t just “innovation metrics”—they’re early indicators of health.

Final thought: Don’t wait for pain

Preventive innovation doesn’t feel urgent. That’s the point. It’s not about fixing what’s broken—it’s about staying vibrant.

So ask yourself:

• What would your business model’s health report say today?

• Where are you relying on pain to force action—rather than investing in vitality?

• What’s one small change you could make this quarter to strengthen your adaptability?

👇 I’d love to hear your thoughts. How do you keep your organization healthy—before it needs treatment?

Let’s talk.

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