“Innovation requires courage and taking some risk.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter made this observation in a 2006 Harvard Business Review IdeaCast discussion about innovation. The sentence names a basic conflict inside established organizations. Innovation asks people to commit time, reputation, and resources before the result is known, while management systems often reward predictability and punish visible failure. Even when leaders request new ideas, employees notice what happens to colleagues whose experiments do not work. Courage becomes necessary because a spreadsheet cannot remove all uncertainty from a genuinely new path.
Courage does not mean recklessness. Intelligent innovation converts a large unknown into smaller questions that can be tested. Teams can begin with a prototype, a limited market, or a reversible operating change, then use the results to decide what deserves more investment. Leaders contribute by protecting time, connecting innovators with resources, and evaluating early work according to learning rather than mature-business revenue. Risk becomes manageable when exposure is bounded and evidence accumulates before commitment expands.
The distribution of risk also matters. Senior executives may celebrate boldness while junior employees bear career costs for a failed attempt. A company can demand experimentation without providing budget, authority, or air cover against internal resistance. Conversely, tolerance for failure should not excuse poor preparation or repeated disregard of evidence. A healthy innovation culture distinguishes an informed test that disproves a hypothesis from a careless project that never defined one. Courage includes stopping an attractive idea when facts turn against it.
Kanter’s sentence remains relevant as companies confront new technology, business models, and social expectations. Leaders can make innovation less theatrical by specifying which uncertainties they are willing to fund, creating staged decision points, and rewarding people who surface uncomfortable results early. Teams can document assumptions, customer evidence, and limits on downside before they begin. The goal is not to eliminate fear; meaningful uncertainty makes that impossible. It is to build an organization in which people can act responsibly despite fear and convert risk into useful knowledge. A post-experiment review should separate the quality of the decision from the luck of the outcome. That protects thoughtful risk taking when chance intervenes and prevents a fortunate result from turning weak reasoning into a model others are expected to copy. Sharing these reviews across teams turns one project’s uncertainty into institutional knowledge. It also makes future requests for courage more credible because people can see how responsible attempts are treated.
Kanter stated the principle in a 2006 Harvard Business Review IdeaCast conversation about how organizations support innovation.
She was addressing the gap between leaders’ enthusiasm for ideas and the practical uncertainty faced by people who pursue them.
New work cannot be fully predicted, so people need enough courage and organizational support to act before certainty arrives.
Responsible risk uses hypotheses, bounded exposure, staged investment, and the discipline to stop when evidence no longer supports the idea.
Employees will judge an innovation culture by how the organization responds to informative failure, not by speeches about boldness.
Leaders make courage practical when they provide time, sponsorship, clear decision points, and fair treatment for well-designed experiments.
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