The Innovation Nobody Photographs

When people picture innovation, they picture laboratories, product launches and lines of code. Very few picture a committee room where a governing body agrees to rewrite a policy. Yet some of the most consequential innovations in history have been regulatory, not technological: changes to rules that unlocked human potential which had been sitting there all along, waiting for permission.

I learned this through the campaign I am most proud of: a five-year effort that overturned a rule in British professional boxing that had stood for nearly ninety years, and secured the first professional boxing licence for a boxer with Type 1 diabetes in the UK. No new device was invented. No app was built. A rule was changed, and with it, the future of every athlete who will now be judged on evidence rather than on a diagnosis.

Old Rules Are Frozen Assumptions

Every long-standing rule is a snapshot of what people believed when it was written. The boxing policy we challenged was drafted in an era when diabetes genuinely could not be monitored or managed in real time. At the time, the rule may well have been prudent. But medicine moved, technology moved, and the rule did not. What remained was not safety; it was the memory of a safety concern.

This is true inside companies as much as inside sporting bodies. Approval chains, eligibility criteria, procurement policies: organisations are full of frozen assumptions that no one has thawed and inspected for decades. As I discovered when building Furniture in Fashion into one of the UK's largest online furniture retailers, the retailers who thrived online were not those with the best warehouses, but those willing to question rules about how furniture was supposed to be sold at all.

Innovating on Rules Requires Different Muscles

Technological innovation rewards speed. Regulatory innovation rewards credibility. When we approached the boxing authorities, we did not arrive with slogans; we arrived with medical experts, monitoring protocols and a willingness to be examined. We invited scrutiny rather than avoiding it, because scrutiny was the only currency the institution could accept.

Over five years we built a case that treated every objection seriously. Could a boxer with Type 1 diabetes compete safely? Under what protocols? With what monitoring? Answering those questions rigorously was the innovation. The licence that followed was simply the product shipping.

The Multiplier Effect of a Changed Rule

Here is what makes rule change such a powerful form of innovation: it scales instantly. A new product must be manufactured, marketed and distributed. A changed rule applies to everyone it governs from the moment it takes effect. The precedent set in that licensing decision did not help one boxer; it redrew the boundary of possibility for an entire category of athletes, in a sport watched around the world.

In my advisory work with governments and international organisations, I encourage leaders to ask a simple question before commissioning any new technology: is the obstacle in front of us a capability problem or a permission problem? If it is a permission problem, no amount of software will solve it. Only leadership will.

How Leaders Can Innovate on Rules

First, audit your inherited rules. Ask when each one was written, what it assumed, and whether those assumptions still hold. Second, distinguish the purpose of a rule from its mechanism. The purpose of the boxing rule was fighter safety; the mechanism was exclusion. We honoured the purpose while replacing the mechanism. Third, build your case with the people who must defend the decision afterwards. A rule change imposed on an institution will be resented; one built with the institution will be protected.

Finally, accept that this form of innovation is slow. Five years passed between the first conversation and the first licence. But when the change came, it was complete, legitimate and durable, which is more than can be said for many product launches.

Redefining What Counts as Innovation

I remain fascinated by technology and invest considerable energy in ventures across retail, sport and international trade, a journey outlined on my about page. But if you ask me for the single most innovative thing I have been part of, it was not digital. It was persuading a proud, careful, ninety-year-old institution that the best way to honour its tradition of protecting athletes was to change the rule that excluded them. Sometimes innovation is not building something new. Sometimes it is having the courage to unbuild something old.

The athletes who benefit from that decision will never see the committee rooms where it was made, and that is precisely the point. The best rule changes disappear into normality: what was once impossible simply becomes ordinary. If your organisation wants to innovate, start by listing everything your people are currently forbidden to do, and ask honestly how many of those prohibitions would survive contact with today's evidence. The answers may unlock more value than any technology you could buy.