Part 2 of 3: Does Corporate Innovation Still Matter?

What I Learned Building Innovation at the Big 4, in Industry and at a Startup Accelerator.

Everyone talks about innovation failure. The statistics are grim, the case studies depressing. But I’ve spent the last decade on the other side of that story, inside the organisations where innovation actually produced results.

Not every time. Not without pain. But enough times to know that when it works, it’s transformative. And when I look at the common thread across those wins, it might not be what most people expect.

Big 4: Treating innovation like a venture portfolio

As Head of an Innovation Accelerator at a Big 4 consultancy, I worked with a team to design and launch a structured internal accelerator. We weren’t just an enabling area running workshops and producing reports. We did the real stuff.

We managed an annual venture fund with real currency at stake. We invested in over 50 early-stage technology solutions. We held initiative owners accountable for progress, projected sales figures and OKRs. When something wasn’t working, we killed it. When something showed traction, we scaled it.

We ran Generative AI hackathons that led to an internal platform scaled across Asia Pacific firms. We empowered juniors to solve problems creatively with technology and embed their applications into everyday business operations. 

What made it work: We anchored innovation in strategy, commercial metrics and stakeholder buy-in. Our ideas didn’t live in labs. They lived in market. Every initiative had to demonstrate alignment to strategy as the first and most important criteria for investment. Rigorous problem discovery established realistic commercial expectations that were tied to ongoing funding. If commercial metrics were not met, initiatives were stopped. That discipline changed everything.

Leading Industry Innovation: Making experimentation measurable

While working in industry, I led an innovation portfolio that delivered considerable commercial value across the business. But the real win wasn’t any single initiative, it was the system we built around them.

We introduced a structured experimentation model that enabled teams to validate ideas with users and pitch directly to senior leaders and board members for sponsorship and support. We shifted the narrative from “innovation theatre” to measurable business impact.

A revamped Chairman’s Award for Innovation helped foster a storytelling-driven culture of experimentation, increasing engagement across the business. People started seeing innovation not as someone else’s job, but as something they could contribute to and get recognised for, both for successful initiatives and shared learnings for initiatives that did not scale due to lower than expected commercial outcomes.

What made it work: We gave experimentation a visible feedback loop. Test, ship, measure, demonstrate value. That cycle built credibility faster than any executive presentation ever could.

Startup Accelerator Chaos: From zero to ten startups in ten months

While at a startup accelerator, I directed a corporate accelerator, which we co-designed to supercharge our client’s innovation capabilities and support the wider industry startup ecosystem. In less than a year, we proved the market for property technology startups with 230+ applications to the program. We selected 12 startups, launched 10 investor-ready ventures and secured over $500K in early-stage venture capital.

But more than the numbers, what struck me was how corporate exposure to founders changed internal mindsets. Senior executives who were once sceptical about innovation were suddenly leaning into startup thinking. The energy was contagious. Senior leaders sponsored pilots, mentored founders and invested in their startups.

What made it work: Real innovation isn’t just about launching new ventures. It’s about shifting culture, systems and expectations. Putting corporate leaders face-to-face with founders created a mindset shift that no internal program could have achieved on its own.

Taking leaders out of the building

Co-founding Link to Asia, a Paris-based business taking senior executives on immersive innovation tours across Asia, gave me a front-row seat to something no internal program could replicate. Put a leader who manages certainty for a living in front of a founder who's rebuilt their business three times in a year and something shifts. The question I kept coming back to was how to make that shift stick once they went home.

What made it work: Discomfort is the ingredient you can’t design into a workshop. Real exposure to real founders, at real speed, changes how leaders think about risk in ways that a two-day offsite never does.

The common thread

Across all of these experiences, the pattern is the same. Innovation works when it is linked to strategy and has commercial accountability. When experimentation has a visible feedback loop. When culture shifts alongside process. And when it’s treated as a lasting capability, not a temporary program.

Strip away any one of those elements and you get what most organisations experience: theatre. Excitement that fades. Initiatives that never scale. Capabilities that vanish the moment the executive sponsor moves on.

The question isn’t whether innovation can work inside large organisations. I’ve seen it work. The question is why it fails so often when the ingredients are well understood.

That’s what Part 3 is about.

Next in this series: Why Corporate Innovation Keeps Failing (And What Actually Fixes It)