Lauren Drake | Co-founder & Director | FiftyKnots | mail me
The cost of building something new has quietly broken from its twenty-five-year curve. Geopolitical fragmentation and AI-led disruption have merged into a single storm over every boardroom, and the assumptions baked into most innovation processes no longer match the world they are trying to navigate. What follows is the argument for why in-house innovation stalls under pressure, and what works instead.
Here is the argument in plain terms. The cost of turning an idea into a working venture has collapsed, not gradually, but in a discontinuity measured in months. The machinery most companies use to select and fund new ideas was built for a world of scarcity. That world is gone. And the gap between what boards intend when they talk about innovation and what they actually get is not a culture problem or a creativity problem. It is a structural one.
The structural problem is solvable. But not from inside the machine that created it.
Time to recalibrate
For a quarter of a century, the cost of turning an idea into a working venture held to one order of logic. Serious capital. A dedicated team. Years before the first customer. Every senior executive reading this priced that reality correctly, because an entire career’s intuition was calibrated on it…
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Read the full article by Lauren Drake as well as a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the August/September 2026 edition of BusinessBrief.
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