The 5 Biggest Pitfalls in Innovation Project Collaboration (and How to Fix Them)

Innovation is a team sport, but not every kick leads to a goal. Jumping into collaboration without a playbook often means wasted energy, frustration, and half-baked ideas. 

When done right, collaboration can be like jet fuel for innovation in your organization. In this article, we’ll look at five classic pitfalls that derail innovation project collaboration, and offer tips on how to avoid them.

1) Collaborating Without a Clear Innovation Strategy

The pitfall: You launch a new project to develop hydrogen fuel cells. Your colleague reaches out to a dozen startups. HR organizes a yearly hackathon. But what’s the goal? You need a leadership-endorsed strategy grounded in market needs and the company’s actual capabilities. Without it you’ll end up chasing ideas that fizzle out without longterm support.

How to fix it: Hit pause. Align the relevant departments around one big “WHY”. This could be a 2-page innovation mandate signed-off by the board. It shouldn’t be too specific on what projects to pursue, but rather state the goals and strategic focus fields. UC Berkeley Executive Education offers this relevant advice:

Align your team's goals with the company's objectives: When team members understand how their work contributes to the company’s overall success, they feel more invested and committed to their roles

2) Bigger Isn’t Always Better in Innovation Project Collaboration

The pitfall: You think “the more, the merrier” so you tell the team to collaborate with the local university’s research lab, a fintech startup, and your company’s marketing department. Weekly meetings expand. Before long, everyone's pursuing different priorities while feeling under-resourced. Instead of accelerating progress, collaboration starts to slow everything down.

How to fix it: Less is more. Start with a tight group and scale up only when your team can absorb new input. Research in the Journal of Innovation & Knowledge warns that when internal resources are stretched, broader collaboration can actually hurt innovation progress:

The benefits of collaboration breadth may be compromised for firms with limited financial capacity because they can absorb less risk and failure, which are required for innovation. Instead, they may focus on short-term benefits, failing to acknowledge the benefits of collaboration.”

The takeaway? Broad collaboration opens doors to new ideas, but without sufficient resources to explore and absorb them, those ideas go nowhere. When teams lack the time, budget, or expertise to act on external input, partnerships create noise instead of value. To benefit from a wide collaboration network, firms need enough internal capacity to experiment and turn ideas into innovation outcomes. 

3) Teams Rejecting External Ideas

The pitfall: A young startup that your company has invested in claims they’ve found a way to reduce the weight of electric vehicle batteries by 30%. Your R&D team is incredulous, convinced that such a gain must come at the cost of reliability. Without reviewing the data, they dismiss it outright. Whether consciously or not, they’re falling into the Not-Invented-Here (NIH) trap—rejecting external ideas not because they’re bad, but because they’re not theirs. The consequence is missed opportunities, as illustrated by this anecdote from Dr. Rolf-Christian Wentz:

"When I was managing director of the German subsidiary of U.S.-headquartered SC Johnson, I witnessed “not invented here” (NIH) syndrome in action. The larger company paid scant attention to an innovative air freshener product successfully launched by an Asian subsidiary, apparently due in part to bias toward innovations originating from the United States. By chance, the Asian product came to the attention of the German subsidiary. We launched the product, now called Brise One Touch, with minor adaptations. It was a big success, taking a leadership position in the local market for that category with a 50% share and going on to do well in other markets."

How to fix it: Acknowledge that great ideas don’t care where they come from. NIH syndrome is common and it’s damaging. One study found that NIH attitudes negatively affect knowledge absorption and project success.  To counter this, foster a culture that values external input and idea sharing. 

There’s a real-world example of a company that found a way to counteract NIH syndrome: Bosch’s Disruption Discovery Teams. For eight weeks, they bought together associates from different geographies, departments, and levels of seniority. Bosch released them from their usual roles so they could move beyond traditional models and strengthen the company’s innovation capability. 

When people work with unfamiliar colleagues and are no longer bound by departmental loyalties, they become more open to novel perspectives. Leaders can support this shift by encouraging teams to look beyond their bubble, by engaging with customers, partners, and colleagues outside their departments. They can also rotate team members to bring in fresh thinking and challenge the status quo. Collaboration only works when people are willing to learn from others.

4) When Company Culture Stops Innovation

The pitfall: Everyone agrees the idea is promising, but nothing happens. Nobody wants to seem out of line or risk failure. In some companies, the culture demands consensus or top-down sign-off for even routine innovation decisions. This typically happens when the company culture reinforces hierarchy. In organizational psychology, this is known as power distance: the extent to which less powerful team members accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. An academic article titled ‘Understanding How Organizational Culture Affects Innovation Performance: A Management Context Perspective’ explains it as follows:

“A culture of high power distance creates high interpersonal risk and low psychological safety, leading to formal communication that relies on rules and processes rather than encouraging individual autonomy or discussion among members.”

When decisions flow through rigid hierarchies, innovation slows. It’s not because people lack ideas, but because they don’t feel empowered to act on them.

How to fix it: Create guardrails that give teams room to move. Decision autonomy allows teams to experiment and move faster. So, define what types of decisions teams can make independently, without requesting top-down approval. Make project roadmaps transparently available in the organization, so that alignment happens without delay. Encourage a mindset shift, from “let’s wait until we get approval” to “this is low risk—let’s try it.” Innovation can thrive in a company culture that balances autonomy with shared goals.

5) Lacking the Right Collaboration Tools

The pitfall: Your team is working on an innovation project sprint using scattered tools. There’s a document to capture ideas, presentation files for roadmaps, and a bunch of spreadsheets that will soon become outdated. You think this is the only option, but in reality, it’s inefficient and hard to maintain. As a result, innovation collaboration slows, because people are spending more time editing documents than doing the work of innovating.

How to fix it: Use one platform built for innovation collaboration. The ITONICS Innovation OS brings together foresight, ideation, portfolio management, and execution in one interconnected system.

We believe this unified approach equips you to:

• Break down silos across departments and geographies by centralizing innovation activities
• Communicate priorities with a range of interactive visualizations
• Boost productivity by minimizing the time spent switching tools and searching for information
• Supercharge innovation with generative AI ideation and automated trend monitoring

If you're serious about boosting collaboration, productivity, and innovation outcomes, the ITONICS Innovation OS is the way forward. Book a demo with our experts, to see how ITONICS can upgrade the way your organization innovates.