The myths of corporate innovation

Business Times

15-05-2025

IF innovation has an iconography, it involves a genius, a breakthrough and a dash of serendipity.
Alexander Fleming notices mould growing on a plate of bacteria and discovers penicillin. John Snow produces a map of the victims of a cholera outbreak in 19th-century London and traces the outbreak to a single water pump. A German chemist called August Kekule falls asleep, dreams about snakes eating their tails and realises upon waking that the benzene molecule has the shape of a ring.
Moments like these make for good film scenes, but they are precisely the wrong way to think about corporate innovation. Firms make advances through sustained effort, the passage of time and teamwork. Take, for example, three stories of innovation from the new season of Boss Class, our podcast on how to be a great manager.
Wayve, a self-driving software firm that is now one of Europe's hottest artificial intelligence (AI) startups, was an outlier for years. Alex Kendall, a co-founder, was studying at Cambridge when he became convinced that the best way to solve the self-driving problem was to have an AI learn patterns of driving behaviour for itself.
That made him unusual. At the time, the industry was trying to write rules for what a car should do when it encounters a specific situation. Wayve's approach is much more orthodox now; last month, the firm signed a deal with Nissan to be part of the Japanese carmaker's autonomous-driving technology. But it has been an eight-year effort to get there. 'The biggest b******* is eureka ideas where you just wake up and have an idea that solves things,' said Kendall.
A good idea can go nowhere if the circumstances are not right. By the same token, having tried something before is not a reason to ignore it in the future, as the case of Google shows. Liz Reid, its head of search, said that many of the tech giant's successes were tried several times before they finally caught on.
BT in your inbox
Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign Up
Sign Up
One example is reviews for restaurants on Google Maps, a feature that the team was sure would be useful, but that initially asked too much of reviewers. The arrival of notifications and of location data was crucial. Before then, you had to remember to write a review or indeed, where you had been to eat. After that, Google's knowledge that you had been to eat in a specific restaurant, and its ability to prompt you to give a rating, made reviewing much simpler.
Finally, consider Monumental, a four-year-old Dutch startup that is trying to mechanise bricklaying by using robots. It depends on constant feedback to improve. Salar al-Khafaji, a co-founder, sold his first startup to Palantir, a data analytics giant; there he saw the practice of 'forward deployment', whereby Palantir's developers work directly with customers to configure its software to suit their needs. His new firm adopts a similar principle of getting out into the real world.
Monumental acts as a subcontractor on construction jobs, using human masons to finish any work that its machines cannot do. Working on projects in this way gives Monumental both a flow of money and, even more usefully, information about all the problems it has yet to overcome.
Building sites are messy, unstructured places, where things get moved, weather changes and lots of things can go wrong. Operators on the site note down every glitch and obstacle that the robots encounter in a shared 'friction log'; engineers and coders at the firm's headquarters in Amsterdam try to resolve them.
Companies achieve big breakthroughs all the time. Dramatic scenes can unfold. Wayve chose to train its cars on the streets of London, because the city's narrow streets, cyclists and jaywalkers make for a particularly testing environment for drivers. Late last year, the firm tested its software for the first time in America: on its first day, the car learnt for itself to drive on the right side of the road, as well as mastering other oddities. You can almost hear the soaring music in the film version.
But, for the most part, corporate innovation is not cinematic. The myths of lone geniuses and moments of inspiration undoubtedly capture the imagination. But the reality – of problems solved by groups of determined people over many years – is an even better story.
©2025 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved