Innovation: A feeling or a skill?

‘Innovate or die’ has been shouted at British business for so long that nobody flinches anymore. It never produced a single decision, a single new product, or a single different way of working. Threats rarely do.

The phrase might be worn out however the sentiment is still very evident.

The UK Innovation Survey 2025, published in June, found that 34% of UK businesses were ‘innovation active’ between 2022 and 2024.¹ That’s down from 36% in 2020 to 2022, and down from 45% in 2018 to 2020. 

Two-thirds of British businesses are not doing anything that counts as innovation. Ask their leaders whether innovation matters and almost all of them will say yes.

So where does innovation sit on your learning and development agenda?

Some organisations recruit for it. They advertise for ‘innovative thinkers’, believing the capability is a fixed trait that employees either have or do not have. Others schedule an away day, run a design-thinking session, or bring in a speaker to tell the story of Kodak and Blockbuster again. These approaches all rest on the assumption that innovation is something people have, rather than something people can be taught.

When training is for temperament, not technique.

Creative thinking is where innovation starts, and it can be trained.

Much creative thinking training focuses on how people feel about innovating. Personality, motivation, confidence, risk appetite, permission to fail, mindset, unlocking your creative self – those kinds of topics. Researchers call this non-cognitive training. We will all recognise the format, which includes walls papered with sticky notes, ideas everywhere, and everyone leaving in a good mood.

Cognitive training concentrates on the mental operations instead. How to generate and expand options on purpose. How to reframe a problem, work by analogy, question-storm, and run divergent thinking before switching into convergent thinking. Technique rather than temperament.

When Scott, Leritz and Mumford reviewed 70 creativity training studies, cognitive training and idea-production training came out strongest. Imagery training, which sits closer to the feelings end of the spectrum, came out weakest.² 

At First Ascent, we advocate for training in the techniques and design for transfer from the outset. Enthusiasm is a by-product of getting good at something, not a substitute for it. There is another area of innovation which, for the UK, possibly matters the most.

Diffusion, the necessary ingredient, often missed

Diffusion is the slightly unglamorous task of taking something that already exists, someone else’s technology or method or business model, and getting it properly embedded in your own organisation. Not inventing but adopting, adapting, and embedding.

While the UK ranked fifth overall in the Global Innovation Index 2024 and third for knowledge impact within that index, it only ranked twelfth in knowledge diffusion.

Technology Adoption Review, 2025 ³

In the UK we are good at having the ideas and comparatively poor at spreading them. We generate, but we don’t absorb.

Valero et al’s survey of UK firms reports that around 40% named a shortage of management skills as a barrier to adopting AI, with a similar percentage naming workforce skills as the barrier.⁴  Nothing to do with the actual technology, more about the people meant to lead its adoption.

If we provide training in innovation skills or creative thinking which helps participants generate ideas, why are we not then providing them with the skills to execute these ideas and knowledge diffusion skills too? Perhaps it is the cost, e.g. a one-day workshop versus a blended 3- or 6-month innovation programme. Maybe it is the expected time commitment. It could also be a lack of awareness that diffusion is a challenge and that it should be part of organisational innovation workstreams.

Whatever the reason, First Ascent include the diffusion of knowledge within all innovation and creative thinking programmes by default.

Three questions for your next L&D review

• Does your innovation training teach technique, or does it mostly work on how people feel about innovating?
• Does it stop at ideation, or does it carry through to implementation and to what happens back at the desk?
• Is diffusion a word anyone in your organisation uses? If not, who owns the job of adopting what others have already built?

Innovation isn’t a personality type, and it isn’t a job title. It’s a set of teachable skills that most organisations are currently leaving to chance. Give people the techniques, then give them somewhere to put them.

We design and deliver creative thinking, innovation and technology adoption programmes for organisations that would rather build the capability than recruit for it.

1. UK Innovation Survey 2025. Funded and developed by the Department for Business and Trade and administered by the Office for National Statistics on its behalf. Published June 2026.
2. Scott, G., Leritz, L. E. and Mumford, M. D. (2004) ‘The effectiveness of creativity training: a quantitative review’, Creativity Research Journal, 16(4), pp. 361 to 388.
3. Technology Adoption Review (June 2025). Review by the Government Chief Scientific Adviser and the National Technology Adviser into barriers to the adoption of transformative technologies. Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The Global Innovation Index rankings quoted are the Review’s citation of WIPO’s Global Innovation Index 2024.
4. Valero, A. and colleagues (2025) ‘Innovation through crises in the 2020s: survey evidence on digital, AI and net zero innovation in UK firms’, CEP Special Paper 50, London School of Economics. Cited at endnote 19 of the Technology Adoption Review.