Episode 17: The Corporate Innovation Myth
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Episode 17: The Corporate Innovation Myth
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First published in A Reasonable Rant: Private Edition (members-only subscription) on 13 Apr 2026.
What if the companies spending the most money on innovation are structurally the worst at absorbing it?
In this episode of A Reasonable Rant, Neo examines the widening gap between corporate innovation activity and actual operational adoption. Drawing on Startup Spectra datasets covering more than 8,000 venture capital firms and hundreds of corporate venture entities globally, the episode explores why accelerators, pilots, innovation labs, and venture capital arms so often create visibility without producing meaningful integration.
From banking pilots in Southern Africa to global AI investment trends, this episode unpacks the deeper institutional tensions shaping modern corporate innovation systems: procurement friction, pilot purgatory, fragmented incentives, and the growing divide between experimentation and implementation. Because once you separate investment activity from organisational transformation, corporate innovation starts looking less like disruption… and more like a system designed to help institutions adapt cautiously without fundamentally changing themselves.