Innovation doesn’t happen by accident—it’s built. How corporations structure, staff, fund, and measure innovation determines whether bold ideas thrive or get stuck in corporate inertia.
Yet the mechanics behind innovation are often a black box. There’s no one-size-fits-all model, and few companies share how they actually make innovation work—or why it sometimes fails.
That’s why I’ve launched the Leaders in Innovation Series. These monthly conversations from Greentown Labs will feature executives from some of the world’s leading companies, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how innovation is truly designed and sustained.
The goal? To uncover what really works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to turning ideas into impact.
Constraints, Curiosity, and Closing the Loop: Navigating the Barriers to Corporate Innovation
Zafer Sahinoglu will be the first to tell you: good ideas aren’t in short supply. What’s rare is the ability to translate them into something that actually affects someone’s day-to-day life. In large organizations, that gap between technology and impact is often where innovation quietly dies.
Following our discussion earlier this spring, I was left thinking about a tension many corporate leaders face: how do you create the space for breakthrough thinking inside a system designed to minimize risk? Sahinoglu has spent his career navigating that very challenge. With three advanced degrees, more than 100 published papers, and dozens of patents to his name, he’s no stranger to the technical side of invention. But these days, as Vice President of Innovation at Mitsubishi Electric, his focus has shifted from building the next technology to building the conditions that transform new ideas into real-world impact.
Our conversation was a reminder that innovation is rarely clean or linear. It’s a constant negotiation between structure and risk, process and possibility. The real work of innovation isn’t avoiding those tensions—it’s figuring out how to move through them.
1. Real innovation needs to close the loop
Before his role as VP of Innovation, Sahinoglu spent 15 years as a Senior Principal Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric, building the kind of technical career that often serves as the professional launchpad for many corporate innovation leaders. By every conventional measure, he was successfully doing exactly what he was trained to do.
Eventually, the work raised a harder question that shifted the trajectory of his career: where’s the impact?
“I realized that while we were doing important research, we weren’t closing the loop,” he tells me. “I wanted to see the end result. I wanted to see people actually use what I’d built—and I wanted to see their lives improve because of it. That’s what pushed me to start looking for answers on how to make that happen.”
It’s a theme that runs through every conversation I’ve had with CIOs: good research isn’t enough. (See my conversation with Daniel Moczydlower, CEO and President of Embraer-X, for more thoughts on this very same topic.) For corporates, the problem typically isn’t that the research lacks merit, but that it lacks momentum. Without the right pathways, even breakthrough technologies stall at the handoff between lab and market.
Sahinoglu’s shift from scientist to innovation leader reiterates this point. Real innovation—the kind that shapes industries and daily life—only counts if it has a measurable impact. Otherwise, in his own words, it’s just “expensive brainstorming.”
2. Hire the most curious, not (necessarily) the most trained
“Innovation is easier when people are naturally curious. You can go further, faster.”
Ask Sahinoglu what he looks for when building innovation teams, and his answer is simple.
“Curiosity,” he says. “You can’t always teach it, but if it’s there, everything else moves faster.”
In other words, while tools and methodologies matter—and at Mitsubishi Electric, those systems are well established—process only gets you so far. The real accelerant for innovation is people who are wired to ask questions, chase problems from different angles, and resist the urge to settle for the first answer. (This, I think, is also what sets companies following an innovation “playbook” apart from the ones writing the next chapter of it.)
The research backs him up. Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist and former professor at Harvard Business School, has found that curiosity in the workplace doesn’t just spark innovation—it also reduces group conflict and improves communication and performance. Ironically, many of the 520 executives she surveyed admitted that they were hesitant to encourage curiosity at all, fearing it would lead to inefficiencies or, worse, loss of control.
These ideas raise a familiar question I’ve heard from other innovation leaders I’ve spoken with: can curiosity be cultivated, or is it innate? Sahinoglu believes it’s both, and I tend to agree. The right environment (one that values diverse perspectives and tolerates failure) can nurture curiosity. But even the best environment can’t manufacture the spark entirely.
For organizations chasing breakthrough ideas, it’s a useful gut check. Are you hiring the most trained, or the most curious? And once they’re in the door, are you rewarding them not just for what they deliver, but for what they’re driven to learn?
3. Bureaucracy and misalignment slow innovation, not tech
For all the focus on technology, Sahinoglu is quick to point out that it’s not what slows innovation down. The biggest delays, he says, are structural. “Corporate complexities hinder progress in innovation. Sometimes it’s the policies, the legal reviews, the IT restrictions. You want to test something new, and suddenly you’re waiting weeks—or months—for approvals.”
Of course, collaboration and buy-in are essential when navigating complex problems or major organizational shifts. But in the world of disruptive innovation, those same structures can create friction points that quietly pile up and stall momentum. For Sahinoglu, responding to this friction doesn’t mean choosing between consensus and decisive action, but rather knowing when to lean into each. Innovation inside large organizations depends on both—alignment that brings diverse voices to the table and the ability to move decisively when the moment calls for it. Tilt too far toward consensus, and vision gets diluted, timelines stretch, and what started as bold exploration turns into expensive, protracted negotiation.
It’s a delicate balance, and one that many organizations get wrong. Companies serious about innovation need to examine whether their internal structures and leadership culture actually support that balance—or whether, in the name of process, they’ve built systems so rigid that innovation never gets off the ground.
4. Innovation thrives on structure and pressure
We love to equate innovation with the removal of constraints (“think outside the box”), but in practice, constraints are often the catalyst. Boundaries, when designed well, can help focus creativity rather than stifle it.
Innovation rarely happens by accident. Having the right setup—curious minds, diverse perspectives, and a company culture that celebrates new ideas—is the foundation. But there’s almost always a driver behind meaningful innovation, e.g., a problem to solve, a new market to reach, an urgency that comes with tight deadlines.
As McKinsey points out, the most effective innovators apply what they call simple rules: clear, specific guardrails that provide just enough structure to encourage creativity without slowing it down. DARPA is a classic example. With just two core rules—(1) projects must advance scientific understanding and (2) have a practical use—the agency has consistently delivered transformational breakthroughs, from brain-controlled prosthetics to next-gen defense technologies.
At Mitsubishi Electric’s Innovation Center, Sahinoglu’s team operates with its own set of simple objectives and rules. His team partners with promising startups that align with the company’s strategic priorities (e.g., supply networks, transportation systems, and green tech, to name a few) with the goal of accelerating cross-sector partnerships. But there are two distinct tracks. About 90 percent of the work is focused on short-term, rapid improvements—incremental innovation that strengthens the core. The other 10 percent, blank-page innovation, is riskier and far more challenging. Its success depends on vision, long-term thinking, and, often, the right constraints to guide the process forward.
5. Having falsifiable objectives can help you create better milestones
“Innovation depends on being able to test your assumptions. But in a lot of corporate settings, milestones turn into fixed endpoints rather than flexible checkpoints.”
Inside large companies, milestones are the currency of progress. But as Sahinoglu sees it, they can also be a trap, especially when they leave no room for uncertainty. “You prepare a business plan, you make your projections, but a lot of those projections are built on assumptions,” he says. “Over time, some of those assumptions hold up. Some don’t.”
It’s a familiar snafu in corporate innovation—the need to show steady, measurable progress often clashes with the messy, iterative reality of breakthrough work. The challenge isn’t unique to the private sector. It echoes the structural friction seen in models like ARPA, where the lofty ambition of funding transformative technologies rarely fits neatly within traditional metrics. Patents and publications (short-term outputs) are easy to count, but often irrelevant to the unpredictable nature of true breakthroughs.
That leaves leaders like Sahinoglu navigating a delicate balancing act. Inside milestone-driven environments, where errors are costly and stakeholders demand constant proof of progress, much of the effort goes into showing small wins—evidence to assuage anxiety, even when the ultimate goal resists tidy measurement.
Perhaps the way forward starts with how objectives are framed in the first place. It reminds me of philosopher Karl Popper’s idea that scientific progress depends on falsifiability, i.e., setting goals that can be tested, questioned, even disproven along the way. Without that, milestones risk becoming more about protecting assumptions than stress-testing them, and the ideas that could actually move the needle never make it off the drawing board.
Looking forward: building for speed in a slow system
One point that stood out in my conversation with Sahinoglu was that he joined Mitsubishi Electric during a pivotal period in the early 2000s, when the company was shifting from a hardware-first identity to one increasingly shaped by software competency, connectivity, and systems thinking. That evolution wasn’t just technical; it was driven by market pressures and the urgency to expand the company’s portfolio. In many ways, it laid the foundation for the launch of the Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Center.
We’re now at a similar inflection point, only this time, the pace is far more aggressive. The speed of technological change has accelerated beyond what many organizations were built to absorb. Innovation cycles that once stretched over decades now play out in years. AI, in particular, has reshaped the landscape with unprecedented speed, raising the stakes for those slow to adapt. And yet, inside many companies, the systems that support innovation are still bogged down by complexity, risk aversion, and misalignment. The new challenge for corporations, then, isn’t just keeping up—but redesigning those systems to make speed possible.
Aisling Carlson is the Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Investor Programs at Greentown Labs. Learn more about Greentown here and about partnership opportunities here.
This article was originally published on Aisling’s LinkedIn.