# How Innovation Happens — Lesson #13: Live in Tomorrow, Not Today
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## Article Content
I've been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I've discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next. "For innovative organizations, tomorrow is the new today." I've come back to this idea repeatedly in my work because the mindset behind innovation usually changes before the results do. What people notice, question, challenge, and act on determines how ready they are for what comes next. The most innovative organizations I have studied spend less time defending what works now and more time preparing for what comes next. That sounds obvious until you look at how most calendars actually work. Today's customer problem, today's quarterly target and today's operational crisis consume all available attention. Tomorrow gets whatever time is left. Innovators reverse the equation. They deliberately create space for the trends, technologies, competitors and customer behaviours that are not urgent yet, because they know those things will eventually become urgent all at once. The future punishes organizations that discover tomorrow only after it has become today. So what does that mean in practice? It means challenging the assumption, habit, or hesitation that is keeping you anchored to the present. Here are three places to start. Action Items: Reserve a fixed portion of leadership time for issues beyond the current fiscal year. Add one "tomorrow metric" to every strategy review. Ask what future issue has no owner because it is not yet urgent. Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/10/how-innovation-happens-lesson-013/