Building breakthrough innovations without disrupting your core business
From the forthcoming book: Innovation Underdogs: The Corporate Rebel Playbook
We're not talking about innovation labs, hackathons, or incremental programs. This isn't about fixing your entire company.
Innovation on the Edge and Beyond focuses on a small, protected part of the company—about 5%—that grows until it can stand alongside the core.
Kodak invented digital photography but was too afraid to embrace it. Nokia, BlackBerry, and Palm clung to what worked. Apple was willing to cannibalize the iPad with the iPhone. Fujifilm pivoted from film to healthcare. The difference? The willingness to embrace change.
3 years funding "innovation theater" with 18 projects and no clear market path. We mapped the portfolio, killed 60% of stalled efforts, redirected capital into 2 high-complexity bets aligned with next-era demand shifts.
$2B company spent 18 months building an innovation lab. It produced 47 pilots, three awards, and zero revenue. We focused only on the 10% that had a real path to market.
$1B bank had a 40-page innovation strategy, seven committees, and zero working pilots. I separated core from breakthrough, cleaned up the management process, set proper KPIs. The first pilot went live in twelve weeks.
This is the pattern everywhere: Innovation theater that looks impressive on stage but dies in practice.
Innovation in large companies is broken.
Not because people are lazy or incapable. It breaks because the system rewards caution and short-term wins. Labs don't ship. Pilots don't scale. Strategies die in boardrooms.
This playbook is for leaders who want to break that cycle intelligently, without blowing up their core business or indulging in theater.
"We want to innovate, but we don't know where to start."
"We've invested millions in startups. That's enough innovation, right?"
"Finance blocks every initiative."
"Why not just improve what already works?"
"We've tried labs and hackathons. Ideas go nowhere."
Innovation doesn't fail because of bad ideas. It fails because the system is designed to protect the present, not build the future. Governance structures that work for core business strangle innovation. Metrics that matter to CFOs don't match metrics that guide builders. Political capital runs out before momentum builds.
The problem isn't innovation. It's the structure, incentives, and politics that surround it.
Most companies don't lack good ideas. They struggle to step back, see the big picture, then zoom in to turn those ideas into reality. The Theta Framework gives you that map.
Companies die when they only live in Core. They burn out when they only chase Beyond. The best companies balance all three.
The question isn't whether you innovate. It's where you're innovating, and whether you're building your next curve before the current one flattens.
Every engagement follows a structured approach designed to move from diagnosis to execution quickly. No 200-page decks. No endless committees. Just clarity, action, and results.
Before building anything new, you have to see the mess for what it is. I map your entire innovation portfolio across Core, Edge, and Beyond. I trace the blockers—decision loops, incentives, org charts, labs that build prototypes no one funds, metrics that make no sense.
The goal isn't to blame. It's to help leaders see what's holding them back and where the real opportunities lie.
Breakthrough innovation can't grow inside structures built to protect the core. We create a protected lane with its own governance and funding. We hardwire a faster decision loop. We reset metrics to match each stage of growth—infant, child, teen, adult.
When innovation stops fighting the core business, everything moves faster.
We work with your teams to ship real pilots, not PowerPoints. We focus on the initiatives with the highest potential for market traction and the clearest path to scale. We test, learn, iterate—fast.
Good stories inspire. But innovation needs builders who ship.
Successful pilots transition to dedicated teams with clear ownership. We establish handoff protocols, ensure continuity, and set up monitoring systems so momentum doesn't die after we leave.
The goal is self-sufficiency—your teams running the new system without external dependency.
You'll know exactly where you stand—which initiatives matter, which are theater, and where to double down. No more guessing.
Pilots ship in weeks, not years. Decision loops get faster. Political gridlock breaks.
Working products in market. Revenue-generating pilots. Scalable innovations that don't cannibalize the core.
The structures, metrics, and governance that enable continuous innovation—not one-time wins.
Innovation theater is a silent killer that erodes everything that makes a company resilient.
When smart people spend years in labs that never ship, they stop believing. The builders leave. The storytellers stay.
Quarter after quarter, the numbers look fine—until they don't. Innovation theater hides the lack of future bets under core revenue.
Customers don't leave in one big wave. They leak away in silence. While you perfect pilot decks, smaller players ship real things.
Pain delayed is not pain avoided. It's pain with interest.
This IS for you if you're tired of the theater, want the pipes fixed, and you're ready to ship.
Limited availability for deep-dive portfolio diagnostics. We work with 3-5 enterprise clients at a time to ensure quality and impact.
First audit includes complete mapping + strategic clarity report.
Request AuditI work behind the scenes with leadership teams and entrepreneurs to help large companies build real breakthrough innovation again.
My background spans industries from mobility to healthtech to manufacturing across Asia, Europe, and the US. I've spent years in the trenches of innovation as both a founder and a fixer.
I'm not big on the hype. I prefer building and fixing the systems that let the next generation build what matters.