Schaffer Consulting Partner, Markus Spiegel, presented at Forbes Mentor Week, a five-day event featuring interactive online presentations from influencers and innovators.

Markus’s talk focused on the four conditions that leaders must create for innovation to thrive. His insights are based on an 18-month research project that looked at successful and unsuccessful innovation teams in several companies across the U.S. and Europe.

Many mature firms struggle to innovate despite having far more resources than start-ups. In most cases, the reason is that they often apply an “execution mindset” – which works well with their existing business models – to innovation efforts that need to be more intuitive, creative, and experimental. This approach unintentionally stifles the effectiveness of innovation teams, forcing them to aim for artificial financial goals, stick to highly defined innovation processes, and under-involve customers in co-creating solutions.

The alternative is to approach innovation as a “complex adaptive system”, such as beehives, ant colonies, or rain forests. These are all examples in nature of systems that have an ability to evolve and adapt through interaction with their environments. For innovation to thrive in mature companies, leaders need to create four conditions: Constant Energy, Creative Friction, Purposeful Discovery, and Flexible Structure. While each condition is simple by itself, developing them in tandem is what separates successful innovation leaders from the rest of the pack.