🟢 Big corps can't innovate? Think again.
This week, I'm getting a bit tired of hearing that innovation centers in big corps are useless. Let me push back on this a bit.
"The fastest way to kill innovation is to put it inside a big company." is now a consensual cliché. This epiphany, somehow scandalous to share fifteen years ago, is quite mainstream.
To be clear, I was at the forefront of this discussion at the time. When corporate incubators, open innovation teams, and other fancy units were starting to take hold in the industry, the diagnosis was already easy to make:
Internal startups were focusing on wishful problems, coming from cheerful ideation sessions; there was no urgency or hunger. And when even semi-successful, they would be quite swiftly isolated from the main business units and slowly asphyxiated by fear of their success. Soon enough, corporate innovation units would loop into a three-year cycle in which they would be rebranded, relaunched with new junior teams, and allowed to fail again.
Old story.
Have things changed today, or are we still in the same fail mode?
The answer is yes.
If anything, budgets for grandiose innovation centers have tightened. Chaos in the markets doesn't help, any more than having failed to create a major innovation breakthrough since their inception.
But... reality is much more complex and nuanced.
