Why I'm Building a Space for Innovation Leaders to Think Together

What if the messy middle was easier with the right people? 📷 Visual by Michelle ✨

There's something I've noticed about how I do my best thinking.

It doesn't happen alone.

I can get to a certain point on my own. I'll research, reflect, explore different angles. With AI, I've even started to push further, giving it different personas, asking it to challenge my thinking from unexpected directions. And that helps.

But the real leaps? Those have almost always come from other people.

A podcast that reframes a problem I've been stuck on. A conversation that cracks something open. An interview where someone says exactly what I've been feeling but couldn't articulate yet.

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I experienced this firsthand when I was working on my MBA thesis, Beyond Innovation Theater: Designing Environments That Empower Intrapreneurs. I was reading, listening, absorbing everything I could find. And all of that gave me ideas. But what truly moved the needle was sitting down with other innovation leaders, people navigating similar challenges inside large organizations, and just... talking.

The same themes came up again and again across every interview. And as someone who naturally looks at the whole system, who wants to understand the environment before pointing fingers at individual pieces, that pattern was everything. It confirmed what I'd suspected: it's rarely just about the person. It's about the conditions they're in.

And then came the question I couldn't shake: why didn't I have this before?

Not just the research. The exchange. The sparring partners. The peers.

I had spent years connecting across functions inside a company, gathering perspectives, building things that actually mattered for manufacturing in the innovation space. I'd been at conferences, at the World Economic Forum, sitting around a table talking about 3D printing with people from completely different industries, and finding that even there, there was common ground. Common struggles. Common insights.

All of that was rich. But it was fragmented. Temporary. Conference-shaped.

What I kept wishing for was something more consistent. A smaller, more intentional version of that. A group of people who either had been where I was, or were right there with me. Who could say "yes, I'm still struggling with that too" or "here's what helped me get through it."

Excited about the work. Struggling with the environment. I was there. And it's exactly why Michelle and I are building this together. 📷 Visual by Michelle ✨

That wish didn't go away. And last year, when I started meeting regularly with my friend Michelle as she was working on her PhD research, it came back to life.

We first connected during COVID through Working Out Loud, a practice running inside a female business network we were both part of.. We met through that and realized we had a lot in common, not just professionally, but in terms of where we were in life. We started showing up for each other weekly with other inspiring women, bringing whatever we were working on, thinking through it together. And something about that consistent, peer-level exchange was genuinely different from anything else I'd tried.

We moved forward. We got unstuck. We thought better together than we did alone.

The right people help you see the dots you didn't even know were there. 📷 Visual by Michelle ✨

So that's what we're building now.

A first prototype of a mastermind for innovation leaders. A guided space where you bring your real obstacles, the things that aren't working, the questions you can't quite answer, the challenges you'd love to think through with someone who actually gets it, and work through them together with peers who are in it too.

No performance. No perfect answers. Just the kind of thinking that happens when the right people are in the room.

We're in early days. There will be more to share soon, including a dedicated page here on the site.

But if you're an innovation leader and you're feeling the pull of what I've described, like you could use a sparring partner, like you've been doing a lot of thinking alone, I'd love to talk.

Reach out. We can figure out together what you might need.

Find Your Wave,

Sarah 🌊