Editor’s note: Julie Averill is the former EVP and global chief information officer of lululemon who led the technology transformation that helped grow the company from $2 billion to over $10 billion in revenue.
As we scaled [lululemon], the pressure to innovate faster intensified. New capabilities, new markets, new guest experiences. The demand was relentless.
The conventional wisdom said we needed to create an innovation team. Give them space separate from operational pressures. Let them explore emerging technologies without the constraints of production systems.
So we tried it. We carved out a small team, gave them freedom to think big. No quarterly delivery targets. No operational responsibilities. Just pure innovation.
Within months, the problems surfaced. The innovation team would build something promising that the operational teams couldn’t integrate because they hadn’t been involved. Or they’d solve problems the business had already deprioritized for legitimate reasons. The operations teams felt like innovation was being done TO them. The innovation team felt dismissed.
I realized the people running operations weren’t less innovative than the “innovation team.” They were just buried under operational pressure with no permission to lift their heads and think differently.
We disbanded the separate innovation team.
Instead, we started asking different questions in interviews. We designed them to reveal curiosity, ownership, collaboration style, conflict approach. Do you naturally see problems and start thinking about ways to solve them? How do you work with people who think differently than you?
Because if you hire curious problem-solvers and then bury them in process without space to think, you’ve wasted what made them valuable in the first place.
What truly unlocked innovation wasn’t a framework. It was hiring people who cared about the problems, then creating conditions where they felt safe to experiment. That’s what created ownership.
That meant protecting time for exploration. It meant celebrating smart failures as loudly as successes. It meant when someone said “What if we tried this completely different approach?” the answer was “Let’s test it” not “That’s not how we do things.”
The breakthrough ideas didn’t come from a separate innovation lab. They came from the engineer who’d been managing our deployment process for two years and finally had permission to completely reimagine it. From the product manager who knew our guests better than anyone and was trusted to try something unconventional. From the data scientist who sat with the business team long enough to understand what problem needed solving.
When people own the problem, they innovate on the solution. You can’t hand someone else’s brilliant idea to a team and expect the same commitment you get when they discover it themselves.
Innovation stopped being a separate function. It became what naturally happened when curious people had trust, time, and permission to solve problems differently.
I’m watching companies make this mistake with AI right now. They create “AI Centers of Excellence” separate from operations, staffed with specialists. But AI isn’t something specialists do while everyone else keeps running the business. It’s something curious problem-solvers use when they have the space and support to ask “Could this tool help me solve this problem better?”
The companies that will win aren’t the ones with the fanciest innovation labs. They’re the ones who hire curious people, build trust and give them permission to reimagine how the work gets done.
Good innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when you trust the people doing the work to find better ways to do it.
Adapted from Chief Impact Officer, published by 8080 Books. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.
