Part 3 of 3: Does Corporate Innovation Still Matter?

Why Corporate Innovation Keeps Failing (And What Actually Fixes It)

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about why I still believe corporate innovation matters despite a decade of frustrations. In Part 2, I shared what actually worked.

Now for the harder question: if the ingredients for successful innovation are well understood, why does it keep failing?

In our experience, the reasons are frustratingly consistent. Across every organisation we’ve worked with, innovation fails in six predictable ways.

When Alejandro and I started comparing notes on our experiences, his decade building product strategy frameworks across scaling companies and mine building innovation capabilities inside the Big 4, corporate accelerators and large industry players, we kept arriving at the same list. Organisations in entirely different sectors, at different stages, with different executive teams, were failing in the same six ways. Not similar ways. The same ways.

Here's what we kept seeing.

The six failure modes

1. Leadership can't agree on what matters most. Ask five senior leaders to independently name the organisation's top three strategic priorities and you'll get five different answers. Not because they're incompetent, but because the strategy was written to accommodate everyone's agenda rather than force real choices. Without a coherent executive narrative, capital follows politics rather than strategy. Teams execute in different directions. Nobody has the authority or the trade-off discipline to stop the drift.

2. Nobody has decided where they're not playing. Strategy is a choice about where to play and, critically, where not to play. Most organisations skip the second part entirely. Strategic assumptions go unexamined. Market bets stay implicit. The innovation portfolio drifts into scattered experiments with no connection to where the organisation actually needs to win. That's not a strategy. That's a wish list.

3. The innovation initiative portfolio is disconnected from outcomes. Most organisations can articulate a strategy. Far fewer can explain how their current work ladders up to it. Which initiatives connect to which goals? What does success look like, and how would you know if you were achieving it? When innovation is measured by ideas generated or hackathons run rather than value delivered, you train the organisation to value activity over impact. Portfolio discipline is what turns strategy from aspiration into execution.

4. No real experimentation culture. Ideas go from whiteboard to pilot to... nothing. There's no hypothesis-driven way of working, no structured way to test assumptions cheaply before committing capital and no system for capturing what's been learned and feeding it back into decisions. Worse, it's often politically unsafe to stop an initiative based on evidence. So bad bets continue, good learnings get lost and the organisation builds the wrong thing at scale without ever validating it first. Failing fast is a cultural aspiration with no structural support.

5. The organisation can't execute even when the strategy is clear. Brilliant strategy, clear priorities, strong experimentation discipline; all of it can still fail if the organisation can't move. Critical skills are missing with no plan to build them. The operating model creates friction rather than flow across functions. Decisions take months to move from agreement to action. And the organisation doesn't learn from its own execution; it makes the same mistakes in different restructures, year after year.

6. No permission, no time and no pathway from experiments to core business. This is the one that gets overlooked most and the one I've watched quietly kill the most promising programs. Innovation doesn't usually fail because organisations lack ideas. It fails because nobody has explicit permission to spend time on unproven work. Employees may have "20% time" in theory but only 5% in practice. Budgets are precarious annual allocations that get clawed back the moment core business demands spike. Innovation teams lack the political credibility to challenge business units. And even when experiments succeed, there's no defined, resourced path for them to transition into core operations. They die in proof-of-concept purgatory.

The tension nobody talks about

These six dimensions interact. Missing any one creates a predictable failure mode. Strong execution without clear priorities produces efficient drift. Good experiments without integration architecture die as proof-of-concepts. Clear strategy without innovation enablement maintains the status quo while competitors evolve and take market share

And underneath all of it sits a fundamental contradiction: organisations tell their people to "be bold" while burying them under BAU, measuring them on core business KPIs and giving them no structural permission to deviate from the norm. You can't champion experimentation and then punish people when experiments fail. You can't declare innovation a strategic priority and then fund it from leftover budget (or no budget at all!).

The organisations that fix this understand something fundamental: this isn't just a process problem. It's a capability problem. And capabilities need to be built deliberately, anchored institutionally and sustained through leadership changes and budget cycles.

Why we built Treble Strategic

This series started with a question: does corporate innovation still matter?

My answer is yes. But it needs to be done differently.

When Alejandro and I built Treble Strategic, we weren't trying to create another consultancy that leaves behind a deck and a handshake. We'd both spent enough time watching external frameworks evaporate the moment the engagement ended, absorbed back into BAU, disconnected from the next executive who came in with different priorities.

Our measure of success is the opposite: how quickly clients don't need us anymore.

That means sitting inside the problem with the team, not facilitating them toward an answer from the front of the room. Teaching strategy and execution disciplines by practising them together. Leaving organisations with the diagnostic tools, frameworks and capability to sustain the work themselves, not a dependency on our continued involvement.

The gap between strategy and execution isn't a communication problem or a framework problem. It's a capability problem. And it's solvable. If you anchor the work at the right level, build the right disciplines and transfer ownership to the people who'll sustain it.

That's what we do. And it's why, after everything, I still believe corporate innovation matters.

If you're wondering where your organisation sits across these six dimensions, we've built a diagnostic for exactly that. 

This is Part 3 of a 3-part series on corporate innovation. Read Part 1: After a Decade in Corporate Innovation, Here’s What I Actually Believe and Part 2: What I Learned Building Innovation at the Big 4, in Industry and a Startup Accelerator.