The best innovation projects often begin with a problem nobody owns

I've noticed that some of the most interesting projects begin with a slightly awkward sentence: “We're not really sure whose problem this is.” That can sound like a warning sign. In practice, I think it is often the opposite. The problems that fit neatly inside one department tend to have a reasonably obvious owner, budget and route to a decision. The difficult ones sit between things. They touch estates, technology, teaching, employers, finance and strategy at the same time. Everyone can see part of the issue, but nobody quite owns the whole of it.

Education has plenty of these problems. A college might want to rethink how specialist teaching is shared across campuses, for example. Is that a curriculum issue, a digital issue, an estates issue or a workforce issue? In reality it is all of them. The moment the organisation tries to force the idea into one existing box, the idea usually gets smaller. It becomes a room refurbishment, a software purchase or a timetable exercise when the original opportunity was much more interesting.

The same thing happens outside education. Organisations are generally structured to operate what already exists. Budgets, reporting lines and procurement categories reinforce that. Innovation, by definition, tends to cut across those structures. That creates an odd situation where an idea can make complete strategic sense while being surprisingly difficult to place on an organisational chart.

The gap between departments is real

I've seen good ideas slow down because every individual involved is behaving perfectly rationally. Estates asks for a specification. IT asks for technical requirements. Finance asks for a business case.

Procurement asks what is being bought. The project team, meanwhile, is still trying to understand what the organisation should actually create. None of those questions is wrong. They are simply arriving in the wrong order.

This is why cross-organisational projects need someone to hold the whole problem for long enough. Not necessarily to own every workstream, and certainly not to pretend to be the expert in everything, but to stop the idea being fragmented before it has been properly understood. What outcome are we trying to create? Who benefits? What has to change around it? Which capabilities already exist? Where are the genuine gaps? Only then does it make sense to divide the work into projects, budgets and responsibilities.

There is a temptation to solve this by creating another committee. I'm not convinced that is usually the answer. Committees can be useful for governance, but innovation needs synthesis as much as representation. Ten people bringing ten departmental perspectives to a meeting does not automatically produce one coherent proposition. Somebody still has to connect the pieces.

Perhaps that is why the phrase “nobody owns it” no longer worries me as much as it once did. Sometimes it means the idea is badly defined. But sometimes it means the opportunity is bigger than the structures currently surrounding it. Those are often the projects worth spending a little more time on.