Tag: Lauren Drake

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.

There's a peculiar kind of blindness that sets in when a constraint disappears. You keep solving for it anyway. You build institutions around it, develop disciplines to manage it, hire people whose entire expertise is navigating it. The constraint becomes invisible and not because it's gone, but because it's been so thoroughly baked into how you operate that questioning it feels like questioning gravity.

Read our exclusive cover story titled The innovation factory – built for famine, not a feast? by Lauren Drake, Co-founder & Director, FiftyKnots, plus a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics.