You’re a change-maker. You care about making things better. You don’t mind failing a little to learn and improve. Where others see risk, you see opportunity, and you have the grit to get things over the finish line. You’ve proven that at every stop in your career.
But now you’re in a big organization. There are more care-takers than change-makers, which is not only frustrating but likely preventing you from doing what you came to your organization to do in the first place: make change and make an impact.
We see this situation a lot, and it’s not always easy or comfortable to provide the guidance that we know can work. In this article, we share the common frustrations we hear from change-makers, reframe those frustrations in a way that will help you build empathy and overcome them, and offer actionable advice that you can use today, all in a way that you’re not likely to hear so directly from most innovation partners.
Frustration 1: There’s no creativity.
Our partners often say: “There’s no creativity in our organization. They want something they know will work and don’t want to try anything new.”
How change-makers should think about it: Yes, your mandate is to think and act beyond the core, but creativity isn’t everything. Curiosity and discipline are what deliver results for innovation teams AND are the traits corporations want because everyone knows they can benefit from clear, disciplined execution whereas creativity can sound less grounded, more risky.
Corporations are skittish when they consider investing in the next “Amazoogle” and often don’t feel that they have the talent to get there, even if they wanted to. In our experience, most innovation teams succeed not when they bring in a “creative” agency, but when they partner with a more entrepreneurial playbook that is designed to solve problems scrappily and create growth.
You should consider building a venture playbook, which provides the blueprint for growth teams, so that disciplined problem-solving can unfold. There is room for leaps of imagination but they take a back seat to good experiment design and strong customer listening skills.
What you should try:
- Don’t even talk about creativity; focus on figuring out how to design and execute well-defined, affordable experiments that can achieve traction with customers. Everyone respects those. And in our experience, the push to return the most learning with the fewest resources always yields creative possibilities.
Frustration 2: There are no entrepreneurs.
Our partners often say: “My team isn’t capable of figuring the right strategy and translating that into something the market wants.”
How change-makers should think about it: Entrepreneurship is a latent talent that likely exists in pockets in your organization but hasn’t been leveraged the right way. In our experience, corporations have plenty of builders and your organization likely has the people you need, they just haven’t been given the right environment to operate in.
We’ve seen this first hand, as our innovation process is designed to include people and teams inside your company. In some instances, these folks even serve as understudies to our venture teams so that they can gain hands-on learning. Once a new concept is getting traction, these “intrapreneurs” and teams take over and scale them up successfully.
What you should try:
- Try out people in potential founder-lite roles to see how they take to it. In our experience about half of them love it and rise to the challenge.
- Call the role “product owner,” which is already understood by large companies as the product management discipline proliferates.
- Pro tip: Enroll others as a “coalition of the willing.” No innovation succeeds without the contributions of friends, family, and fans.
Frustration 3: Leaders are risk averse.
Our partners often say: “My leaders are risk averse and won’t let me even try to succeed.”
How change-makers should think about it: Most people are failure averse, not risk averse. You’re just a little different, in that you have the knack and grit to make things turn out well.
Leaders absolutely want innovation (and you) to succeed. They understand the concept of acceptable loss in the pursuit of growth.
The unit of progress for innovation is learning. Driving learning through affordable experiments shows that you are seeking learning, and impact, pragmatically, not recklessly. When you frame discrete experiments, and create tight guardrails, leaders will back you and try to help you succeed.
In-market experiments are the moments of truth for a venture. The skills required include experiment design, rapid prototyping and iteration, and identifying signals that validate your hypotheses, as well as amplifying disconfirming signals.
What you should try:
- Focus on experiments with customers as the focal point of spending budget, not workshops, training, decks, etc.
- Keep your experiments tied to disciplined timelines that are tighter than the norm at your organization. Set guardrails. This shows that you and your team are serious, capable, and trustworthy.
- Pro tip: Seek disconfirming evidence too, and show it. Share the outcomes and what you learned transparently, good or bad. Leaders know there is bound to be failure, and will respect you for leaning into it versus trying to hide it from view.
…For every corporate culture ‘antibody,’ there are five allies waiting to be activated.
Frustration 4: Corporate culture will kill my progress.
Our partners often say: “Innovation is perceived as threatening by my organization and will get crushed by the corporate culture.”
How change-makers should think about it: It’s safer for most people to say, “It’ll never work.” That’s just the vocal minority. They lack the clout and the commitment to drive innovation. And sometimes, people see their role as maintaining the corporate culture and norms around how things get done. For change-makers, the corporate culture can start to feel like antibodies – there to defend against anything that might harm the bigger system.
In our experience, for every corporate culture “antibody,” there are five allies waiting to be activated.
Watch for who stays quiet but their eyes light up. They are rooting for you, and might even want to join you. Some of the silent majority are your latent entrepreneurs (see #2 above).
More importantly, look for the business sponsors who were you four years ago. Make them your internal clients. They are among the allies who will make you excited to go to work everyday.
What you should try:
- Ask. For. Help.
- If you operate like your direct reports are all the resources you have, then you’re toast. Succeeding at innovation isn’t about avoiding the antibodies, it’s about enrolling the allies.
- Align metrics. They may feel like they are worlds apart, but follow the family tree far enough back and they point to the same North Star. Ask. Listen. Connect the dots with your internal partners and you’ll start looking and feeling like you’re better together.
- Pro tip: Choosing your internal clients is way more important than choosing the problems you work on. Wins in a large organization depend on collaborators more than markets.
Frustration 5: Even if a new concept succeeds initially, it’ll never get adopted by the core business.
Our partners often say: “I don’t see a path from experimentation back to the core.”
How change-makers should think about it: It’s true that most small successes don’t turn into billion-dollar brands.
Innovation exists to serve the core business with rapid learning. Your work can generate value in many ways besides launching the next unicorn. That’s a huge asset.
You are the rapid learning unit. No other part of the core business is allowed to operate with such agility. Sometimes what you learn will turn into a new product or business. But more often, it will change a product or service feature, influence a go-to-market strategy, or even shut down a dead-end exploration. Those are a huge value to a large enterprise.
Put that on display! Show the range of outcomes, the variety of value-adds, and ensure that there are smalls and mediums with the larges (and consider starting with smalls first).
What you should try:
- Embrace your role as the rapid learning unit for the business. Develop an expansive view of “exits.” Track and report your contributions, small and large.
- Pro tip: Tell your team and yourself: “Others will get the credit, not us. And we are OK with that.” You are different from a startup, and that’s part of serving the core business.
Change-makers don’t wait for perfect conditions—they create momentum. In a big organization, that means playing the long game: framing experiments wisely, enrolling allies, and delivering learning fast. Together these are small changes that can accumulate into a big impact on the relationship between a core business and its innovation team/group(s). The system won’t change overnight, but with every smart move, you’re shifting it from within. Keep going.
Clay Maxwell is Managing Partner at Peer Insight + PX Studio.
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