Corporate Innovation Learnings
Why read this?
Hard truths and practical tools from inside the boardroom trenches.
This guide shows what makes corporate innovation succeed, and what silently kills it.
Tesh Srivastava
June 13, 2025
9
min read
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Why we need another war story
Corporate innovation isn’t always a straightforward business. Gary, who joined the Daedalus team in early 2025 to help clients navigate and deliver against innovation challenges, has been developing his expertise over nearly 20 years: from his beginnings as a consultant to his days as an in‑house change agent asked to turn clever slideware into something that was actually shipped. Along the way he has trained machines to pay insurance claims in seconds, told ambulances where to drive when every second matters, and watched more "game‑changing" initiatives die than live.
We hope this article will provide some sensible advice on some of the principles to bear in mind when working on corporate innovation projects within an existing organisation, based on our (well, specifically Gary’s) decades of expertise delivering new products from the inside.
Gary’s first decade was spent inside the big consultancies - EY, KPMG and the rest - learning that large client organisations rarely suffer from a lack of ideas; they suffer from a lack of implementation. Most projects began the same way: a client would announce that they were drowning in data, followed by the whispered confession that no‑one actually knew what questions to ask that data. Gary’s mantra became brutally simple: if the machine can be trained to take the decision, prove it in a sandbox, then scale.
That bias towards building rather than theorising led to early wins: an insurer’s claims triage model that collapsed days into seconds; a prototype dispatcher that routed stroke patients to the hospital with capacity and the right specialists; a Facebook‑inspired optimisation engine that re‑balanced ambulance fleets to optimise routes and shorten arrival times - and save patient lives. But the real education lay in the initiatives that failed – and they failed often.
What does corporate innovation actually mean in practice? It’s tempting - and not uncommon - to think of it as a ‘fun’ marriage of R&D, strategy and some hackathons; the reality is, inevitably, significantly more complex.
In the main, corporate innovation projects involve one of the following:
- Reimagining existing parts of the business - so, for example, a finance business might wonder whether it can reimagine business savings accounts to offer a new product? Given it already has the infrastructure and licensing in place, this is (in theory) just a reinterpretation of product and packaging and delivery.
- Devising, developing and launching an entirely new product from scratch, and by so doing moving into a brand new market with a new offering
What determines whether a corporate innovation project will succeed? Based on our experience, it depends on the extent to which it delivers against the following three requirements:
- Competitiveness
will this materially grow or defend revenue?
- Cost
will it remove real, cash‑item cost in the next planning cycle?
- Compliance
will it keep regulators out of the building and the CFO out of handcuffs?
For an innovation project to be successful it will need to deliver against two of the above - failure to do so tends, in our experience, to result in the project dying a slow (or, occasionally, very quick) death.
- The curse of bleeding‑edge tech
The business asked for real‑time behavioural insight: could the team predict, with second‑by‑second latency, when a player would open the app and which market would tempt them to lay a bet? The algorithms said “yes”. The streaming tech stack said “not today”. In 2014 the tooling for sub‑second feature engineering simply was not battle‑hardened; the proof‑of‑concept crawled under load, senior sponsorship waned, and the budget shrank to a skeleton crew. Eventually the same idea resurfaced years later, on a mature technology base, and worked.
Lesson learnt:
chasing the frontier is admirable, but the frontier bites. Run a pre‑mortem – imagine the failure in advance and decide whether the odds are still worth taking.
- The anti‑fraud platform that never left procurement
Working alongside a tier‑one bank, Gary’s team built a cross‑channel surveillance platform to monitor transactions: Bloomberg ticks, chat logs, order books – all stitched into one suspicious‑behaviour graph. The business loved it, risk loved it, compliance loved it… right up until the final budget committee, where the head of IT frowned at the price‑tag and announced, “We can build this ourselves.” The deal died on the spot.
Lesson learnt:
corporate deals are decided by people who were not in the stand‑ups. Stakeholder mapping is not admin – it is survival.
In venture capital a 10‑percent hit‑rate is celebrated; in corporates, the expectation is perversely the opposite, because failure feels personal when the P&L is public. Gary argues that experimentation budgets should mimic VC maths: multiple parallel bets, explicit checkpoints, and the courage to euthanise a project the moment one of the Three Cs collapses. Innovation theatre clings to zombie pilots; real innovators run a humane abattoir
Not every win involves bleeding-edge tech. When the UK’s DVLA abolished the physical tax disc, a byzantine mess of forms, envelopes and queueing evaporated overnight. The user experience shrank to a letter with a QR code; the postal sorting floor became an empty warehouse. Nobody calls that artificial intelligence, but it is the sort of negative space innovation – removing friction until nothing is left to see – that changes industries. Gary keeps the tax‑disc story on slide one of every kick‑off: make the remarkable disappear, and the customer will call it magic.
The insurance industry’s scramble to comply with Solvency II looked, at first, like a bureaucratic tax. Gary saw an excuse to modernise decades‑old data plumbing. Automating lineage and reconciliation checks didn’t just satisfy the auditors; it tightened actuarial models, sharpened risk‑selection and, incidentally, freed underwriters from spreadsheet purgatory. The moral: when a new rule arrives, look for the upgrade budget hiding inside the compliance budget.
- Trust the model – but translate it
A classifier that outperforms humans is irrelevant if the claim‑handler does not believe the probability score. Invest in explainability early.
- Innovation is a career strategy – manage that reality
Some colleagues chase the press release, not the KPI. Spot the self‑promoters and align incentives before the roadmap is agreed.
- Own the runway
Many pilots have funding for Year 0 but none for Year 1 ops. Innovation that lacks a home inside BAU will be orphaned as soon as the CFO rings the cost‑cutting bell.
- Portfolio, not pet project
Treat ideas like options. Back a handful, double‑down on traction, shut down the rest without regret.
- Pre‑mortem
run the failure scenario workshop.
- Stakeholder map
identify every signature required, formal and political.
- Three‑C scorecard
rate the idea brutally; if only one C is green, kill it or pivot.
- Sandbox build
90 days maximum to a working demo; anything longer is waterfall in disguise.
- Change‑absorption plan
where will the process, head‑count or KPI pain land? Budget for it.
- Exit criteria
define, in writing, what success looks like and who pays for scale‑up.
As you can see, we - and, very specifically, Gary - have extensive experience of delivering corporate innovation projects; and of the reasons why they sometimes fail. If your organisation is looking for assistance in ensuring you achieve the former rather than the latter, you might want to give us a call. Here are a few reasons why:
Everyone at Daedalus writes production code before they write an executive summary.
Copy–pasting a GitHub repo or dusting off last year’s case study might win speed points, but it rarely survives real‑world entropy. We begin with the equations, not the screenshots, because if the maths does not work the app will not either.
Our MVPsrun in a sandbox while the competition is still colour‑coding stakeholder matrices. When the CFO wants to know where the ROI hides, we show them logs, not lorem ipsum.
Big‑name firms monetise diagrams; we monetise decision‑speed, error‑rate, and cost‑line movement. If you want a 200‑page vision deck, hire a wavy-arm consultant. If you want claims settled in under a second, hire the people who have already shipped that.
Top‑tier strategy shops are brilliant at telling an organisation where it might be in ten years. We are better at dislodging stubborn problems in ten weeks. Bring us hard questions, a data swamp, and a budget that expects answers, and we will leave your team with something that compiles and convinces.
If you’d like to talk to us about corporate innovation and how we can help you deliver, chat to Gary on gary@daedalusbuild.com
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