Corporate innovation didn't die. It moved in with you.

The glass-building lab era is over, and a lot of people are calling it a failure. We'd call it a wrong turn that led somewhere more interesting. The work didn't disappear. It just changed who's responsible for it.

Everyone's burying the wrong thing

A few years ago, the conversations we kept having at client dinners all had the same shape. Someone would mention Unilever shutting down the Foundry. Someone else would bring up GE Ventures, or Shell's New Energies unit going quiet, or the BMW Startup Garage winding down. And then, invariably, someone would say: "Corporate innovation is over."

The evidence looked compelling. The centralised lab model - that cathedral of whiteboards and resident futurists, carefully quarantined from the actual business - had burned through billions and produced very little that anyone could point to on a P&L. It ran experiments the BUs hadn't asked for. It hired people with no interest in the company's core operations. And it reported to a Chief Innovation Officer whose mandate usually lasted about as long as the CEO who'd hired them.

We've been embedded in enough of these organisations to know the obituary got the diagnosis wrong. The centralised lab failed for a reason that had nothing to do with innovation being hard or corporates being slow. It failed because it put the mandate in one place and the accountability in another, and nobody ever resolved that gap. Unilever's Foundry didn't fail because Unilever lacks conviction. It failed because conviction without skin in the game is just a budget line.

So yes, the lab died. But watch what happened next.

The work moved. It didn't stop.

Something we keep noticing when we're embedded in a large organisation: the sharpest read on where a market is moving rarely lives in the innovation team. It lives in the BU. The commercial director watching a specific customer segment behave differently. The product lead fielding the same unusual request from multiple accounts. The general manager sitting on a P&L who knows exactly what her business can't yet do but increasingly needs to.

These people have always had the signal. What's changed is that they now have the mandate to act on it. Over the last five years, decision-making on what to build and what to bet on has migrated from the centre to the business unit. BU leaders hold the innovation agenda now. They define the territory, allocate the resource, and own the outcome. The central innovation function, where it still exists, has become a coordinator or a governance body. The operators are in the units.

And the signal flow has inverted. Strategic bets used to come down from ExCom as decrees. Increasingly, they surface upward from BUs with a close read on what's happening at the market edge. ExCom still ratifies. Still sets the risk envelope. But the agenda is written in the BU and approved at the top.

Call it a structural reconfiguration rather than decentralisation. The person responsible for building new things now sits inside a unit with a quarterly target, a sector P&L, and a leadership team whose careers were built on the existing business. A harder operating environment than the innovation lab. But a more real one.

What actually changes for the person doing the work

Something strange happens when you move innovation into a BU. The resources get closer. The decision-maker is down the hall. You'd expect that to make things easier. It doesn't. The proximity that helps you is the same proximity that exposes you to every budget review, every resourcing trade-off, every quarterly pressure the core business lives under. We see this in almost every engagement we run. The challenge isn't access. It's protection.

Four things have shifted fundamentally for corporate builders working in this environment.

The ideas aren't the problem. They never were.

Here's what we don't say often enough. Every intrapreneur we work with knows what to build. They've known for a while. Some have been carrying the same conviction for two or three years, waiting for the right moment to surface it. The ideas are there. The problem is that every mechanism surrounding those ideas - the budget cycle, the KPI framework, the governance model, the risk appetite of the BU leader - was built to protect what already works. None of it was built for what doesn't exist yet.

Put a venture inside a BU and ask it to survive on the same oxygen as the core business, and you'll get one of two outcomes. Either the venture gets measured on core KPIs and dies quietly in the first review cycle. Or it gets protected so carefully that it never develops the commercial muscle it needs to actually launch. We've seen both. The first is more common than people admit.

The conversation worth having - and most people wait too long to have it - is the governance conversation. Before the venture has a name. Before the team is assembled. What the BU leader needs to hear isn't "give us freedom." It's a specific proposal: here's the governance structure that gives this venture the best shot at returning real value to this business unit, and here's exactly why it looks different from how you run everything else. That conversation is far easier to have before anyone has a stake in the outcome.

A harder model. A more honest one.

Across the work we've done over the last few years, something has become clear: corporate innovation is more alive in most large organisations than it was during the lab era. Not easier. More alive. Because it's closer to the business, the customer, and the people who have actual authority to act. The distributed model demands more of the builder. But the centralised model asked very little of the business, and that was always the problem.

The intrapreneurs who'll define the next decade aren't the ones who chased innovation theatre for career capital or managed upward to a Chief Innovation Officer. They're the operators embedded in BUs who learned to shelter a venture from the business model surrounding it, who read the ExCom agenda before they walked in the door, and who found partners willing to cross the threshold with them rather than hand them a slide deck and wish them luck.

The map of corporate innovation has been redrawn. The interesting territory is at the edges, inside the BUs, at the boundary between what a business needs to protect and what it needs to become.

That liminal space is, as it turns out, exactly where we work.