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’m launching the Leaders in Innovation Series. These monthly conversations 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.
“What keeps me up at night is the question of how we at Saint-Gobain are best equipped to deliver on the innovation growth that we need in today’s world—and, just as importantly, tomorrow’s.”
Anne Hardy is a systems thinker reshaping how a 360-year-old company builds its future. When I met with her in February, I was reminded that even the most established industrial players must constantly recalibrate to stay relevant in an era of exponential change. As we sat down to discuss innovation—not as banal corporate buzzword, but strategic imperative—it quickly became clear that Saint-Gobain’s legacy doesn’t weigh it down so much as it provides the scaffolding for reinvention. And reinvent it does—Hardy is clear that the innovation journey is one of constant change; iteration, growth, testing—are part of Saint-Gobain’s perpetual evolution and that while the ambitions are clear the journey is also a work in progress.
Just a week prior to our conversation, LexisNexis® released its annual roster of the top 100 companies driving innovation in the global economy, based on an analysis of nearly 16 million patent families. For the second year in a row, Saint-Gobain appeared on the list. This isn’t anything novel for the company, which was founded in 1665 by the royal decree of Louis XIV to produce mirrors for the Palace of Versailles before becoming a materials-science powerhouse whose reach now extends to global construction and high-performance composites. But as any expanding heritage company knows, this kind of growing global footprint comes with a set of challenges to navigate: sustainability, sound environmental practices, addressing the most pressing needs of the time while future-proofing strategy.
Today, Hardy leads the charge to ensure that Saint-Gobain, which operates out of 80 countries and maintains thousands of patents, continues to embrace the ethos of a startup: agile, future-focused, and unafraid to challenge its own playbook.
Going into the conversation, I wanted to understand exactly how Hardy, the company’s Chief Innovation Officer, manages this—i.e., how an incumbent as diversified as Saint-Gobain avoids the inertia and atrophy that often accompany legacy. More than anything, I was curious to hear about the key principles and insights from Hardy’s career, and how they translate to a vision for innovation teams at both small startups and large enterprises.
1. Innovation does not equal R&D
Hardy’s background may seem traditional, even linear, for a CIO—she studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate, obtained her Ph.D. in Material Science from MIT, and came up the R&D route. (Hardy is a Saint-Gobain lifer; she started at the company in 1992, fresh out of MIT.) Still, she is quick to draw a line: innovation is not R&D, and technical qualifications alone (Ph.D. included) shouldn’t necessarily be the key prerequisite for successful innovation strategy and leadership.
“R&D can be a leg of innovation, but innovation can happen in many ways and requires a different set of stakeholders.”
In organizations, confusing innovation and R&D is not only a semantic mistake, but a structural one. While R&D often sits deep in the technical heart of a company, innovation, as Hardy defines it, must stretch across the entire business: from product development to marketing, from customer insight to go-to-market execution. It’s a connective function, not a departmental one. That Saint-Gobain places innovation directly under the CEO is one standout moment from my conversation with Hardy—it acknowledges that innovation needs both proximity to executive leadership and freedom from siloed incentives.
2. Innovation is both a mindset and a process
When I probe Hardy on how she defines innovation at Saint-Gobain, she mentions two axes.
The first is mindset: an empowered, collaborative way of working rooted in the belief that there’s always a better way to do things. This ethos, of course, extends far beyond product teams and considers how people across the organization approach problems, share knowledge, and make decisions. Innovation, in other words, is not confined to R&D labs, but embedded in how the work gets done.
The second axis is structural: a formal system that gives that mindset shape and rigor. Saint-Gobain, like many large companies, classifies its innovation efforts across three categories: core, adjacent, and breakthrough. This taxonomy is useful shorthand for balancing incremental improvement with longer-term bets. But Hardy is quick to point out that these categories aren’t proxies for time horizons. E.g., a breakthrough can happen faster than a core update, depending on context.
The key variable, then, is strategy. In steadier markets, the company may lean into adjacent and breakthrough, while in times of crisis or uncertainty, it may double down on core.
Still, the system has its limits. Breakthroughs often sit outside the scope (and appetite) of business units, especially when budgets are tight. Without direct incentives or dedicated funding, ambitious ideas risk being sidelined in favor of safer, incremental work. It’s a common tension: if strategy doesn’t explicitly support transformational innovation, and the money isn’t there either, the system defaults to what’s measurable and immediate. The challenge, ultimately, is to advocate for breakthrough ideas and build the structures that make them viable.
3. Strategy should inform innovation, not vice versa
“At Saint-Gobain, the strategy informs the portfolio, and the portfolio informs the projects. Underscoring everything is a rigorous, structured methodology that allows us to be efficient and execute on our ideas successfully.”
Which leads me to one of the most important takeaways from my conversation with Hardy: it’s not enough to chase new ideas for their novelty. At the end of the day, innovation still needs to serve a clear business purpose, one defined at the highest levels of the organization and accountable toward the strategy, market relevance, and long-term value creation. Hardy emphasizes the first step in developing an innovation strategy is to ensure the strategy is aligned with the business goals and its portfolio.
4. Innovation is not a window dressing
In a landscape where many legacy firms treat innovation like theater, Saint-Gobain’s model, as articulated by Hardy, is a reminder that innovation, to be effective, must be embedded, not ornamental. Put another way, innovation seen purely as a branding or PR tool quickly loses its credibility; instead, it has to be accountable to strategy, market relevance, and long-term value creation.
5. Focus on where you’ll fail (not just where you’ll succeed)
Hardy is clear-eyed about failure. She notes that when innovation projects falter, it’s rarely because the technology doesn’t work. More often, it’s because the team didn’t fully understand the market (or the customer) early enough. “You prototype, you test, you get feedback, and you adapt,” she says. “And you do all of that in the early stages, not when you’re close to launching.” It sounds obvious, but in many organizations, especially those optimized for execution, it’s still not standard practice.
To guard against these late-stage surprises, Hardy’s team focuses on stress-testing its business models as early as possible. What are the biggest gaps? What would make this fail? Why wouldn’t a customer care? These questions are framed to expose risk while there’s still time to pivot. It’s a subtle shift in posture—from “how do we make this work?” to “what might make this break?”—but key, I think, to a broader shift in innovation mindset that treats failure not as an endpoint but something to be actively anticipated and engineered around.
Looking forward: the integrated innovation approach
If there’s one throughline to draw from Hardy’s approach at Saint-Gobain, it’s that innovation can’t be siloed—it has to be deeply integrated in the project and the systems/methodologies behind it. This calls to mind a salient point raised by Lux Research in Three Things Innovation Leaders Must Do in 2025: the next frontier of innovation isn’t just developing new technology, but aligning the entire organization around how, when, and why to bring it to life. That means standing up cross-functional innovation councils, integrating perspectives from R&D, operations, marketing, and even regulatory affairs. It also means expanding how we define readiness and maturity—not just whether the tech works in a lab, but whether it can be manufactured at scale, sold into a receptive market, adopted by the value chain, and introduced into a societal context that’s prepared to accept it.
Perhaps most importantly, an integrated innovation approach must balance both present and future goals. Deprioritizing innovation for short-term profitability may appease investors now, but is both shortsighted and strategically corrosive, with steep long-term costs: stalled projects, demoralized teams, and a weakening of the company’s core growth engine, to name a few. Aligning innovation strategy with corporate priorities—while preserving plenty of space for adjacent and breakthrough work—is vital. Without that balance, companies risk trading relevance for quarterly returns.
Ultimately, an integrated innovation approach lays the groundwork for a more durable innovation practice. It’s a model that tolerates and even plans for complexity. And as legacy organizations face mounting pressure to deliver real, measurable progress, not just moonshots or marketing spin, the ability to rethink their structures and create the conditions where innovation can truly thrive may well become the defining capability of innovation leadership.
Aisling Carlson is the Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Investor Programs at Greentown Labs. Learn more about partnership here.
This article was originally published on Aisling’s LinkedIn.