Part 1 of 3: Does Corporate Innovation Still Matter?

After a Decade in Corporate Innovation, Here’s What I Actually Believe

After more than a decade working in corporate innovation across Europe and Australia, including three soul-crushing years leading innovation at a Big 4 consulting firm, it would be easy for me to say: no, corporate innovation doesn’t matter.

The slow pace. The box-ticking exercises. The PowerPoint decks that masquerade as strategy. The initiatives that never make it beyond the whiteboard. The hype cycles. The performative brainstorming. The endless hackathons that garner excitement and ‘reignite innovation’ within business units.

After a while, you begin to wonder: is this all theatre?

But after some time away and a period of honest reflection, I find myself arriving at a surprising conclusion. Despite the frustrations, the missteps and the moments where it felt like I was shouting into a void, I still believe corporate innovation does matter. In fact, I believe it matters more now than ever before.

Innovation isn’t an accessory. It’s the engine.

Too often, corporate innovation is reduced to sticky notes and innovation theatre. Considered nice to have in up markets, easily defunded in down cycles, readily ignored. But real innovation is a structural necessity. It’s what keeps a business breathing, adapting and evolving.

Done well, it’s not about buzzwords. It’s about momentum, resilience and future readiness.

It pushes boundaries beyond business-as-usual. It experiments with emerging technology before it’s mainstream. It creates cultural fluency around ambiguity, creativity and calculated risk. And it aligns ideas with commercial outcomes, which is the part most innovation programs don’t always get right.

The truth is, somebody inside the machine needs to think about what’s next. Not just what’s billable. Not just what’s operationally efficient. Someone needs to ask: what’s around the corner? And more importantly, are we ready for it?

Somebody needs to be the future. And more critically, somebody needs to align strategy and execution to the organisation’s future.

Why I almost walked away

After my time in the Big 4 and large corporates, I was burnt out. Not from the work itself. I loved building innovation capabilities, running accelerator programs, managing venture funds. The work was energising.

What burnt me out was the gap between what innovation could be and what organisations allowed it to become. The endless fight for relevance. The traditional KPIs that don’t reward risk-taking. The changing executive sponsors who arrive with different priorities and dismantle what you’ve built. The mental gymnastics of pushing something uphill that the organisation says it wants but isn’t willing to structurally support.

I watched years of capability-building evaporate. I’ve seen innovation teams absorbed back into business as usual the moment their executive sponsor moved on. I’ve sat in meetings where a beautifully crafted strategy was interpreted five different ways by five different business units, all claiming alignment.

Those experiences leave a mark. They make you question whether the whole enterprise is worth the fight.

Why I came back

But here’s what I keep returning to: I’ve also seen what happens when it works.

I’ve seen leaders lean in and suddenly an entire team shifts from cautious to curious. I’ve seen incentives align and experimentation become part of the organisation’s DNA. I’ve seen careers transformed when people are given the platform and the skills to solve problems creatively. I’ve seen companies shift trajectories because someone inside the machine was brave enough to think differently or simply ask a better question.

At its best, innovation is not fluff. It’s the strategic engine powering relevance, future competitive advantage and the next iteration of every organisation.

The problem was never that corporate innovation doesn’t matter. The problem is that most organisations don’t know how to make it work. They treat it as a program instead of a capability. They fund it like a project instead of a discipline. And they anchor it to individual sponsors instead of institutional commitment.

That’s a solvable problem. But more on that later. First, let me show you what I’ve seen work and what made it work.

Next in this series: What I Learned Building Innovation at the Big 4, in Industry and a Startup Accelerator