How to Build Innovation Momentum When You Have Limited Authority
- Susie Braam
- Feb 16
- 10 min read
You can’t mandate change. But you can build a coalition that makes change inevitable.
Here’s the thing about most innovation roles: you’re responsible for driving change across an organisation, but you rarely have the authority to make anyone do anything.
You can’t force a business unit to adopt your frameworks. You can’t compel a senior leader to prioritise your initiative over their own. You can’t mandate that people change how they work. And yet, that’s exactly what your role requires.
If you’ve been following this series, you’ve done the groundwork: clarified your team’s purpose (Article 1), assessed your organisational readiness (Article 2), chosen your orientation (Article 3), designed your operating model (Article 4), and built the measurement approach to prove value (Article 5). But none of that matters if you can’t build the momentum to make things happen.
This article is about influence — specifically, the deliberate, strategic work of building a coalition of support around your innovation efforts. It’s the part of innovation leadership that nobody teaches you, and the part that determines whether your team thrives or quietly fades into irrelevance.
Start With Relationships, Not Solutions
When I took on my second Head of Innovation role — in a national security organisation — I made a deliberate decision that went against preconceived ideas about what my role was.
I didn’t start by building things. I didn’t arrive with a strategy deck or a list of initiatives. Instead, I spent my first weeks being genuinely curious: asking questions, requesting introductions, listening to people describe their challenges in their own words. I wanted to understand the reality of the organisation’s innovation maturity before I proposed anything.
This was especially important because I was new to this organisation and didn’t have an established network. I couldn’t rely on existing relationships or institutional knowledge. Everything had to be built from scratch.
What I found was that while innovation was happening sporadically and in small pockets, maturity was low — particularly among the organisation’s leadership. But I also found something more valuable than any diagnosis: I found people who cared. Leaders who were frustrated by the status quo. Teams who had tried new approaches but felt unsupported. People who wanted to innovate but didn’t know how.
By leading with curiosity rather than solutions, I was able to empathise with people’s challenges and demonstrate that I had genuinely listened. I didn’t arrive armed with ‘you need to do this’ — I worked with early adopters on problems they cared about. This built trust, and trust built traction.
Within months, I had a growing network of supporters across the organisation — people who advocated for innovation because they’d experienced its value firsthand, not because they’d been told to.
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: influence starts with understanding, not with persuasion.
The Four As: Building Your Coalition of Support
As you build relationships across your organisation, you’ll notice that people support your work in different ways. Not everyone who’s on your side plays the same role, and understanding these distinctions helps you be more intentional about who you need and what you need from them.
I use a framework I nickname The Four As to categorise the different types of support an innovation team needs. I first came across these roles (and the following stakeholder map) in the Corporate Explorer Fieldbook by Andrew Binns and Eugene Ivanov, who describe them as part of building a leadership movement for corporate ventures. I've adapted them here for innovation teams more broadly.
Most innovation teams invest heavily in finding their Angel — the executive sponsor — and then assume the rest will take care of itself. It won’t. A sponsor without a supporting network of Allies, Advocates, and Ambassadors is a single point of failure. If your Angel moves role, loses influence, or gets distracted by other priorities, your entire support structure collapses.
The goal is to build a distributed network of support. Which is more resilient — one powerful sponsor, or twenty people across the organisation who believe in what you’re doing and actively support it in different ways?
Mapping Your Stakeholder Landscape
Once you’re clear on the types of support you need, the next step is understanding where people actually sit in relation to your work. This is where the Stakeholder Map comes in.
The map plots people on two axes:
The vertical axis: Impact — how much ability does this person have to block or enable your work? This isn’t just about formal authority. Some of the most influential people in organisations have no formal power at all — they’re respected voices, cultural leaders, or gatekeepers to critical relationships or resources.
The horizontal axis: Opinion — what is this person’s view of innovation and what you’re trying to do? Do they actively support it, oppose it, or sit somewhere in between?
This creates a landscape that looks something like this:
Your Angels sit in the top right — high impact, supportive. Your Allies, Advocates, and Ambassadors are on the right-hand side too, with their vertical position depending on their formal or informal influence. In the top left are your blockers — people with real ability to impede your work who don’t support it.
The value of this map isn’t just knowing who’s where. It’s being strategic about how you invest your time and energy.
Resisters and Blockers: They’re Not the Same
One of the most important distinctions on your stakeholder map is between resisters and blockers. They're often lumped together, but they require very different strategies.
Resisters are sceptical but persuadable. Their concerns are often legitimate: they've seen initiatives come and go, they're worried about workload, or they simply don't understand what you're trying to do. The best approach is to listen first and start with their priorities, not yours. If a business unit leader is worried about customer retention, show how your innovation approach can help with that — don't pitch them on your innovation portfolio framework. Resistance often dissolves when people feel heard and see tangible results.
Blockers are different. They have real influence and actively impede your work — redirecting resources, undermining initiatives in leadership forums, or refusing to engage. With blockers, the first step is understanding who influences them. Check your stakeholder map — who do they respect? Sometimes the most effective strategy isn't engaging the blocker directly but working through people they trust. This is where your Ambassadors become invaluable.
And sometimes, despite your best efforts, a blocker won't shift. I've been in that situation. I had a senior leader whose understanding of innovation was fundamentally misaligned with the organisation's needs. He saw my team as a resource to further his own agenda rather than serving the wider organisation. When the CEO asked for our support with strategic priorities, he argued against our involvement.
I tried direct and indirect approaches. I tried working through people he trusted. But the misalignment was structural, not interpersonal, and one that couldn’t be solved through influence alone. Ultimately, I made the decision to leave. Before I did, I carried out a full assessment of the organisation's innovation capabilities and recommended, among other things, that innovation should be repositioned outside of his remit. He told me not to share the report. I shared it widely, including with the most senior leadership. Many of those recommendations were eventually implemented.
Not every stakeholder challenge has a tidy resolution. Sometimes the right move is to prioritise the organisation's long-term interests over your own position — and to be honest about what you've seen, even when it's uncomfortable.
The Ask You Don’t Make
In the same organisation, I had genuine support from senior executives. One of them had quarterly reviews with his Deputies — the leaders responsible for major lines of business. I was helping those business lines set up ambidextrous portfolios: balancing their core operational work with strategic innovation. Some adopted this well. Others were reticent.
Here’s what I should have done: asked that senior executive to include innovation portfolios as a standing agenda item in those quarterly reviews. Asked each Deputy to talk through the health of their innovation pipeline alongside the rest of their business performance. This would have normalised innovation as a leadership responsibility — not just something my team was pushing.
I never made that ask. And looking back, I’m fairly sure the answer would have been yes.
I think what held me back was partly pride — a difficulty asking for help when I needed it. Perhaps a sense that I should be able to make this work on my own, through the strength of the work itself. But influence doesn’t work like that. Having good ideas isn’t enough. You need people with authority to create the conditions in which those ideas get a fair hearing.
The lesson: be specific about what you need from your supporters. Don’t just tell your Angel you ‘need more senior buy-in.’ Tell them exactly what you need them to do: ‘Can you add innovation pipeline health as an agenda item in your quarterly reviews with Deputies?’ ‘Can you ask [name] to meet with me to discuss how we can support their team’s strategic priorities?’
Most senior supporters want to help — they’ve chosen to back you, after all. But they’re busy, they’re managing a hundred priorities, and vague requests get deprioritised. A specific, actionable ask is a gift: it tells them exactly how to use their influence on your behalf.
Putting It Into Practice: The Innovation Stakeholder Map
I’ve combined the Four As framework and the Stakeholder Map into a single practical tool — the Innovation Stakeholder Map. You can download it here: https://susiebraam.kit.com/stakeholdermap.
Here’s how to use it:
Step 1: List your stakeholders. Think broadly. Include anyone with influence over your team’s success — not just the obvious senior leaders. Think about peers, budget holders, operational leaders, even influential individual contributors. If you completed the Key Stakeholders section of your Innovation Team Model Canvas (Article 4), start there.
Step 2: Categorise using the Four As. For each person who supports your work, identify their role: Ally, Advocate, Ambassador, or Angel. Some people may play multiple roles. Some may not fit neatly into any category yet — that’s useful information too.
Step 3: Plot everyone on the Stakeholder Map. Place each person according to their Impact (ability to block or enable) and their Opinion (oppose, neutral, or support). Your Four As should cluster on the right. Resisters and blockers will appear on the left or in the centre.
Step 4: Identify your gaps and priorities. Look at the map and ask yourself:
Do I have an Angel? If not, who could I recruit?
Do I have Ambassadors who can engage with my resisters and blockers?
Where are the high-impact neutrals? Those are your highest-priority conversion opportunities.
Am I over-reliant on one or two supporters? What happens if they move on?
Step 5: Define specific asks. For each of your key supporters, write down one specific, actionable thing you could ask them to do this quarter. Not ‘support innovation more’ — something concrete. ‘Mention our pilot results in the next leadership meeting.’ ‘Introduce me to the new Head of Operations.’ ‘Include innovation health as an agenda item in your quarterly review.’
This last step is the one most people skip — and it’s the one that transforms good relationships into real momentum.
The Bigger Picture: Influence as Innovation Strategy
Stakeholder management isn’t a side activity for innovation leaders. It is the strategy. The most brilliant innovation framework in the world achieves nothing if nobody adopts it. The best pilot in the world dies if nobody champions its scale-up.
Throughout this series, I’ve talked about innovation teams as internal startups. And like any startup, your success depends not just on the quality of your product but on your ability to build a market for it. Your stakeholders are your market. Your coalition of support is your distribution channel.
Revisit your stakeholder map regularly — people move, priorities shift, and new opportunities emerge. The leader who was a resister six months ago may have had an experience that’s changed their perspective. The neutral who seemed unimportant may have just been given responsibility for a major transformation programme.
Influence is not a one-time activity. It’s a discipline.
Bringing It All Together
This is the final article in this series, and it feels right to end here — with influence. Because ultimately, innovation leadership isn’t about frameworks or canvases or metrics. Those things matter, but they’re only as powerful as the relationships and trust you build around them.
Over these six articles, I’ve tried to share what I’ve learned — including the things I got wrong — about building innovation teams that actually work. Here’s the full journey:
Article 1: Why Innovation Teams Fail (and What to Do Instead) — Starting with purpose: understanding the job your innovation team is hired to do.
Article 2: Innovation Maturity — Six Dimensions of Organisational Readiness — Diagnosing your context honestly before you design anything.
Article 3: Architects, Builders, and Enablers — Choosing Your Innovation Team’s Role — Choosing the right orientation for your team based on what the organisation actually needs.
Article 4: Your Innovation Team is a Startup — Designing your operating model with the Innovation Team Model Canvas.
Article 5: How to Prove Innovation Value Early (and Keep Stakeholders With You) — Measuring progress, building accountability rhythms, and communicating value before the big wins arrive.
Article 6: How to Build Innovation Momentum When You Have No Authority — The coalition-building and influence strategies that make or break innovation teams.
Together, these articles form a practical system — from diagnosis through to influence — with downloadable tools at every stage. If you’ve followed the series from the start, you now have a toolkit for designing, launching, and sustaining an innovation function that’s grounded in your reality, not someone else’s playbook.
Thank you for reading.
Further support: I know that reading about this and applying it are two very different things. Every organisation is different, every context has its own politics and constraints, and the gap between knowing what to do and making it happen can feel enormous. If you’d value some support, I offer coaching and advisory services for innovation leaders and the organisations that back them. I’d welcome an initial informal conversation — you can reach me at info@susiebraam.com.
One more thing: I’d love to hear from you. If you’ve been using any of the tools or frameworks from this series, I want to know how it’s going. What’s worked, what hasn’t, what you’ve adapted. The best insights I’ve gained have come from hearing how other people apply these ideas in contexts I’d never have thought of. Your stories make this work better for everyone.
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