Can an Airplane Bathroom Teach You to Innovate?

Can an Airplane Bathroom Teach You to Innovate?

Rebecca Pinn, Sr. Director of Innovation Consulting at EPAM, sat down recently with Danny Nathan on the Innovate, Disrupt, or Die podcast to talk through something most enterprise leaders are wrestling with right now: what real innovation strategy looks like when the technology landscape keeps shifting underneath it.

Product development cycles that once ran on multi-year cadences got compressed into months, first by digital and now by AI. That compression isn't just an engineering problem. It puts pressure on strategy itself, and it surfaces a distinction Pinn has seen trip up organizations across healthcare, financial services and transportation: a revenue target is a goal, not a strategy. Real strategy is a technology-agnostic vision of what a company wants to be and the experience it is building toward, ambitious enough to pull the organization forward and stable enough to absorb the next disruption without losing direction. When that foundation exists, new technology becomes a tool to evaluate against a clear standard. Without it, organizations tend to say yes to everything, from "we need an app" to "we need AI," and end up moving on all of it without advancing any of it.

Building genuine innovation capability inside a large organization compounds the challenge. It requires a second way of working, one that runs alongside the processes built to keep the core business running rather than competing with them for the same resources and governance structures. And it requires a culture where proposing something that might not work is treated as part of the process, not a risk to someone's standing. As Pinn puts it: "It's not about a failure, it's about what's the return on learning."

Watch the full conversation, including how designing airplane bathrooms led to innovation strategy, here.

Explore how EPAM helps enterprises design the strategy and build the capability to stay ahead of disruption. epam.com/strategy