The AI company trying to make innovation boring - in the best possible way. Repeatable, measurable, and built on 20 years of Harvard research.
Most organizations treat innovation the way farmers used to treat rain: as weather. Something you hope for, occasionally get, and can never quite schedule. You hold the offsite, you buy the sticky notes, you invite the loud person from marketing, and then you wait to get lucky. Sometimes it works. Usually the ideas evaporate somewhere between the whiteboard and the budget meeting, and everyone agrees to try again next quarter.
InnovationForce, a software company based in Durham, North Carolina, has built its business on a quietly contrarian idea: that innovation is not weather. It is plumbing. Unglamorous, systematic, and - if you install it correctly - reliable. Their flagship product, a platform called InnovationWorks, exists to turn the mystical act of "innovating" into a set of steps you can actually run, watch, and measure.
The pitch is easy to caricature and harder to dismiss. Companies are drowning in documents - strategy decks, roadmaps, board memos, engineering wishlists - all of which gesture at problems worth solving without ever quite naming them. InnovationWorks includes an AI feature called the Challenge Builder Agent that reads those documents and drafts sharp, specific problem statements. It answers the least glamorous but most important question in any innovation effort: what, precisely, are we trying to fix?
Once you have a well-formed problem, InnovationForce matches it against a library of solutions that other organizations have already validated. The company says its platform holds more than 7,000 challenges and nearly 5,000 solutions, with over 75,000 matches connecting the two. The premise here is genuinely humbling: the problem keeping you up at night has, statistically, probably been solved by someone in your industry already. Innovation, in this telling, is often just discovery you were too busy to do.
The numbers InnovationForce cites are the kind that make a skeptic reach for a footnote. Customers, the company says, make decisions about 85% faster and save an average of roughly $500,000 per idea - largely by killing the wrong projects early instead of funding them into oblivion. Portland General Electric, one of its utility customers, reported cutting its pilot cycle time by 64%. These are self-reported figures, and you should read them the way you read any company's favorite statistics: as directionally interesting rather than divinely certified. But the direction is the point. The claim isn't magic. It's less waste.
What keeps the whole thing from feeling like another dashboard is where it came from. InnovationForce was co-founded by Dr. Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor who has spent more than two decades studying how innovation actually happens inside real organizations. Her research reached an unfashionable conclusion: great innovation is collective, not heroic. It's a system, not a lone genius. That finding is now baked into the software, which is a polite way of saying the product is an argument with the myth of the visionary founder - written, ironically, by two founders.
The Challenge Builder Agent reads your organization's documents and drafts clear, specific problem statements - so teams stop innovating in a fog and start pointing at something real.
Match your challenge against thousands of peer-validated solutions across industries. If someone already solved your problem, you find them instead of reinventing it.
Embedded workflows, training, and collaboration tools let entire ecosystems - not just one team - move an idea from statement to pilot without losing it in the gap.
In 2024 the company added InnovationWorkspaces, a subscription-based, lower-cost version of the enterprise platform. The interesting move a company can make with a good product isn't always adding features - sometimes it's lowering the door, opening enterprise-grade tooling to startups, universities, and smaller teams that were priced out.
Nearly two decades at the intersection of disruption and transformation, much of it in energy. She has co-founded a cybersecurity company, led a Clinton Global Initiative project, and was selected for a U.S. trade mission on innovation and clean energy. Named to Inc.'s Top 500 Female Founders of 2025.
A leading scholar on building high-performing innovation cultures. More than 20 years of her research into how innovation actually works inside organizations forms the intellectual backbone of the InnovationWorks platform.
Utilities are supposed to be slow - regulated, cautious, allergic to risk. So it is a little surprising that some of InnovationForce's most enthusiastic customers are energy companies. The logic, on reflection, isn't surprising at all: slow industries have the most to gain from moving faster, and the least room to guess wrong. Where mistakes are expensive, structure becomes a competitive advantage.
Reported a 64% reduction in pilot cycle time using the platform.
Among the utility organizations running structured innovation programs.
International utility using the platform to match challenges to solutions.
Partnerships include AEIC (grid advancement) and NRECA (electric cooperatives).
Interviews and product walkthroughs from the InnovationForce channel and Kim Getgen's talks on innovation and the energy transition.