For Innovation, Be Adept to Adapt — Not Merely Adopt


Working with client teams on cross-domain innovation, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern: the search for a ready-made solution.

The tendency is to copy what worked elsewhere, import it, implement it.

It feels efficient. It rarely is.

Because innovation is rarely about direct adoption.

It is about intelligent adaptation.

The Best Practices Trap

There's a deeper force at work — institutionalised and well-intentioned:
the management paradigm of adopting best practices.

To be clear, best practices have their place.

Benchmarking, standardising, and importing proven methods can drive improvements in efficiency, quality, and consistency. That value is real.

But the impact is incremental.

True innovation generates disproportionate value — outcomes that are non-linear, whether it is for customer-facing aspects or internal to the operations.

And disproportionate value almost never comes from doing what everyone else is already doing, only slightly better.

When organisations treat best-practice adoption as innovation, they optimise for the known — and miss the potential to generate disproportionate value for themselves entirely.

Adapted, Not Borrowed

The most powerful cross-domain innovations show this clearly — healthcare redesigning aviation's safety checklists for clinical realities; retail reinterpreting hospitality's service design for transaction speed; education reshaping gaming's engagement loops for learning outcomes.

In each case, success came not from adopting the form, but from adapting the deeper thinking behind it.

Form → Function → Principle → Paradigm

This is the representative ladder of deeper thinking. Most adopters stop at the first surficial layer.

Disproportionate value resides at the deeper layers.

Fit Practices, Not Best Practices

Best practices are a ceiling disguised as a benchmark.

They tell you what was best in the past or at best today
— not what could be for tomorrow.

Those who convert best practices into fit practices — designed for their context, built on first principles, calibrated for disproportionate impact — are the ones who lead the next curve.

For innovation, be adept to adapt — not merely adopt.


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