Avoiding along some dimensions is easy. Create organization space and bring in some new talent so the innate cultural resistance is less material. Unfortunately, it's rarely that easy.

I think people make innovation much more complicated than it needs to be.

If you invest the time to understand the customer better than they know themselves, if you know the things they want or need even if they can't articulate it, you can begin to develop a good sense as to where there really are unmet needs in the market.

People who copy what exists copy a point-in-time artifact, and if you are managing the process correctly you are already hard at work on the next thing.

I have a fear right now that what I call the advertising-narcissism complex is sucking up way too much top talent.

Make sure that you take the time to think about how other companies might respond to your idea, both those companies already in the market you plan to target as well as others that might imagine targeting that market.

Bring different groups together internally, send them out to visit other companies, or bring in interesting speeches. Show that you love learning by having people on staff whose job it is to explore without any near-term metrics. Publicly shut a project down and talk about what a great job a team did because they learned so much. And so on.