Innovation doesn’t always start in a conference room.
As a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian American, I was sitting at home the other day snacking on dried seaweed, nori, while my kids were eating popcorn. Normal household chaos. At some point I wondered, what if you combined the two?
It didn’t wrap neatly like sushi rice. I just took a big bite of nori and popcorn together. It was delicious.
Out of curiosity, I Googled it. Turns out a few companies already sell this combination. For forty-five dollars a bag.
That’s innovation and differentiation. And when you have both, you earn the right to charge a premium.
The same principle applies in proposals. Innovation lets you speak directly to customer pain points in a way competitors do not. It also has to be real. If you claim innovation in a recompete but haven’t delivered it on the contract, evaluators will see right through it.
Over the years, I’ve relied on three “secret weapons” to drive real, credible innovation in capture and proposals.
If you struggle with innovation or proposal differentiation, start here.
When leadership teams share similar backgrounds, experiences, and career paths, ideas tend to circle the same drain. It’s an echo chamber. You don’t get breakthrough thinking from uniformity.
Because of my background and time living abroad, I can pull from multiple cultural reference points when shaping solutions or innovation strategies. That perspective shows up immediately in how problems get framed and solved.
There’s historical proof this works. The Silk Road connected Greece to China as early as the first and second centuries BC, and it accelerated innovation across civilizations. Gunpowder, printing, the magnetic compass, advanced mathematics, ceramics, and silk all spread through cultural exchange.
I saw this firsthand living in Japan. Programs like JET invested public funds to bring educators from across the English-speaking world into Japanese schools and local government. When I worked in the Mayor’s office in Takikawa, we hosted delegations from Pakistan and Malawi to exchange knowledge on systems, industries, and governance. Innovation flowed both ways.
Your customers are diverse. Their challenges are complex. If your team isn’t diverse, your ideas probably aren’t either.
The second source of innovation isn’t people. It’s perspective.
I deliberately study companies outside my industry and look for transferable ideas. Strong differentiation rarely comes from copying competitors. It comes from borrowing proven concepts from elsewhere and adapting them intelligently.
Take the Ritz-Carlton. Their approach to customer service has been dissected endlessly. But instead of admiring it, ask a harder question. How would that mindset translate into program execution, stakeholder engagement, or issue escalation on a federal contract?
One open-source framework I find especially compelling is Kickbox, which is designed to foster internal innovation and intrapreneurship. If more organizations adopted structures like this, innovation would stop being accidental.
There are two types of innovation worth understanding.
Most proposal and program teams live in the first category, and that’s fine. The real obstacle isn’t process. It’s fear.
Many leaders believe innovation comes from methodology. Read the right book. Follow the right framework. Replicate what worked somewhere else. If that were true, innovation wouldn’t be so rare.
Innovation starts with a belief that there is a better way to do something. That belief forms in a person’s mind. And people are wired to fear rejection, judgment, and failure. If those fears aren’t addressed, ideas stay silent.
If you want innovation, you must create an environment where people are encouraged to speak up, test ideas, and fail without being punished. Without that, no framework will save you. You’re not just stalling innovation. You’re handing advantage to your competition.