Negotiate a Budget

Without a budget, innovation is just a hobby.

It’s one of the first signs a company isn’t serious. Not because innovation is expensive (most ideas aren’t) but because someone has to actually do something once the ideas are in. That takes an investment of time and money.

If you’re setting this up, treat budget like a litmus test. If leadership won’t even allocate a little, it probably means they expect no results. That’s a red flag. Best case scenario you get something in writing to save you some headaches in the future.

You don’t need a massive experimental budget to start. You just need enough to try the first top 3 ideas can move forward. After that, it gets easier.

Say you’ve got $2,000. That might be enough to test a small tool license, fund a prototype, or offer time off for a team to work on a fix. What matters is proving to leadership and your contributors that ideas don’t just sit there but that they lead somewhere. Once people see that, asking for a bigger budget later becomes a different conversation.