When we talk about innovation, we tend to treat it like glitter. Add a little “new,” sprinkle some “AI,” and hope it shines. In episode 113 of Manana No Mas!, we sat down with Vanessa Thompson to get far more practical. We talked about what innovation actually is, how teams build an innovation culture on purpose, and why “listening” is often the most underused tool in business.

This matters if we run a digital agency, build on WordPress, sell eLearning, or support e-commerce brands navigating digital transformation. Our clients don’t pay for novelty, they pay for results. The best ideas usually come from getting close to the real pain points and staying honest about what customers and communities actually want.

Why Vanessa Thompson sees innovation through culture, finance, and systems

Vanessa’s work sits at the intersection of innovation culture, finance, and culture, which is a useful mix for anyone trying to build a business that lasts. She’s a Berkeley graduate, and she’s hosted conversations with well-known guests, including Venus Williams and leaders in innovation from major organizations.

Her career path also explains why she’s so focused on corporate culture, not just what they say:

• She started in cleantech, including work with a NASA-based biofuel startup in the early days.
• She’s worked inside large institutions (The Nature Conservancy, the World Bank, and the UN Foundation), where bureaucracy and organizational structure can slow change down.
• She’s also worked in leaner environments, including startups and venture capital, where speed matters and mistakes cost real money.

That range is why her answers don’t stay theoretical. When we asked what makes an innovative organization, she kept coming back to how teams decide, how they listen, and how they foster cross-functional collaboration to align people to a shared mission. It’s less “big brainstorm,” more “repeatable habits” that cultivate an innovation culture.

If we’re building a service business, this lands fast. In agency work, we see the same pattern: the teams that grow aren’t the ones with the flashiest ideas, they’re the ones that can learn faster than everyone else, then turn learning into action.

What “innovation” means when we stop using it as a buzzword

We pushed on the word “innovative” because it’s overused. Vanessa didn’t dodge it. She gave us two grounded ways to think about innovation strategy: measurement and purpose.

On measurement, she pointed out that different organizations track innovation differently, based on what they’re trying to achieve. A few examples she shared:

• IP creation over a period of time (like what’s developed every few years).
• Revenue growth from new products, such as setting a goal that a large portion of revenue will come from offerings that didn’t exist a few years earlier. These approaches deliver measurable results tailored to specific goals.

But the more useful part was her core definition, which embodies a customer-centric focus: innovation is finding a new way to solve real customer pain points and creating a new revenue stream from it. That’s a clean test for building an innovation culture. It also exposes a lot of “innovation theater,” where companies chase disruptive innovation through shiny features that customers never asked for.

We see this in Digital Marketing and web builds all the time. People want a site that “sizzles,” then we look at Apple or Amazon and realize the opposite is often true: simple flows, clear structure, minimal friction. Innovation can be removing steps, not adding them, unlike casual brainstorming that lacks repeatable habits.

Vanessa shared a classic example from business case studies: a shower and faucet company added a remote control so you could change water temperature from another room. It used new tech, but it didn’t solve the actual problem customers had. The feature sounded modern, but it missed the point.

For agencies, the same trap shows up when we add automation, AI tools, or complex funnels without confirming what the buyer is stuck on. New tools are only “innovative” when they help someone make progress.

Listening as an innovation skill, not a soft skill

Vanessa’s strongest point was that many market shifts come from deep listening, not louder messaging. She described listening as full attention without rushing to respond, then connecting what we heard back to the business model, establishing it as a core functional skill in the innovation process.

One of her best stories was Red Sea Global, a hotel development group that did something uncommon. Instead of ignoring locals, they embraced open innovation by asking what the local community wanted. The two requests sounded unrelated to hotels: a banana farm and sailboats tied to local culture.

Most companies would dismiss that as “not our scope.” Red Sea Global didn’t. They made it part of the experience:

• The banana farm supported a distinctive farm-to-table offering around the hotels.
• The sailboats became a cultural sailing experience that travelers would come specifically to do.

It became a competitive advantage created by stakeholder listening. The lesson wasn’t “always say yes.” The lesson was “listen long enough to find the business value inside the request,” revealing where high-value idea generation originates.

We also talked about a real problem agencies and creators face: early-stage businesses often don’t have enough audience feedback to guide them. Then later, when companies get big, they can stop listening because leadership assumes they already know best. We’ve seen that happen in traditional industries too, where brands build what they think is cool and try to convince customers afterward.

Vanessa tied this to the idea of “small data” (deep observation) versus “big data” (broad patterns), linking small data and stakeholder feedback to a healthy innovation culture. Big data can tell us what happened. Small data helps us understand why it happened, and what people meant when they chose it.

This even shows up in communication channels. We shared an example that surprised us: younger people ignoring email but getting genuinely excited about physical mail. If our customer’s habits shift, our strategy has to shift too, even if it feels like going backwards.

Building a culture that stays innovative, even as we grow

Vanessa described a “Silicon Valley startup mindset” as something rooted in shared mission, purpose-driven culture, and intrinsic motivation. She called it a “moon mission,” a goal that feels bigger than a paycheck, one that encourages risk-taking and experimentation, perhaps through hackathons or innovation labs. When people believe they’re building something meaningful, they don’t jump ship for a small raise, and they invest more of themselves into the work.

She referenced Interface, a company that made carpet (not a flashy industry). Under CEO Ray Anderson’s leadership commitment, it moved from a traditional, dirty model toward a regenerative approach, aiming to give back more than it took from nature, fostering an innovation culture. It took time to convince the team, and it started with small wins, but it led to real innovation and long-term employee engagement.

She also shared a lesson from a former Disney chief sustainability officer: big changes (like removing single-use plastics) require diplomacy inside the organization, which builds an innovation culture. That diplomacy starts with understanding what each leader cares about, then building a mission that connects those priorities into one direction through smart resource allocation.

For agencies, this connects directly to leadership and hiring. A common failure pattern is promoting top performers into management without a growth mindset, then being shocked when they manage like a personal leaderboard. We talked about how leadership improves when we stop trying to make everyone work our way, and start mapping strengths and work styles across the team with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion, while creating psychological safety and failure tolerance for ongoing risk-taking.

This shows up in eLearning businesses too. When we build training and membership programs on WordPress, the goal isn’t to cram in features, it’s to make learning easy to complete in line with business goals. Tools matter, but structure matters more. For example, the LifterLMS core plugin is strong on its own, and it can be expanded with add-ons for payments (including Stripe, PayPal, and Authorize.Net) and e-commerce workflows (including WooCommerce). The platform can also be extended through integrations, and it’s designed to work with any well-coded WordPress theme, which is helpful when we’re building client sites.

The bigger point is the same: innovation comes from clarity, listening, and smart constraints, not chaos. AI and automation can support that, but they can’t replace it.

Conclusion: Innovation starts when we listen like we mean it

Our biggest takeaway from this conversation was simple: innovation is less about having wilder ideas, and more about listening well enough to find the ideas that already fit. This forms the core of any effective innovation strategy. When we connect customer pain points to clear metrics, build teams with diverse strengths, and unite people around a mission they can stand behind, we foster innovation culture and a resilient corporate culture for business longevity, creating better work and better businesses.

If we want to follow Vanessa’s work, we can start with her upcoming book Innovative by Nature, and we can also listen to her show and connect with her here: Vanessa Thompson’s LinkedIn profile, The Sustainability Experts on LinkedIn, and The Sustainability Experts website. We can also find the broader podcast home at Manana No Mas!.

What’s one place in our business where we’re adding “new,” when we should be listening harder instead?