Big organisations love to talk about innovation. They set up labs, hire “transformation” teams, and run hackathons. 

Yet inside many companies, the best ideas still die in PowerPoint decks or get buried in cautious business cases.

In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Gravity cofounder James Boult, an innovation specialist who has spent years inside large New Zealand organisations, watching this play out in real time. 

Boult’s verdict is that most corporates are structurally set up to smother genuinely new ideas, even when the will – and the talent – is there.

Boult’s core advice is to treat every significant new idea as if it were a venture‑backed startup inside your organisation. That means giving it a dedicated budget, a finite runway, clear deliverables, and hard stage gates where the project must “earn” the right to continue. No more quietly funding side projects from the core P&L. No more open‑ended experiments that drift for years without real customers.

The gatekeepers and the fear factor

Instead, project owners should be forced to pitch for the next tranche of funding just like founders fronting up to investors. That shift, says Boult, changes behaviour overnight. Teams become sharper on the problem they’re solving and far less likely to hide behind internal politics or legacy metrics.

The episode also digs into the human side of corporate innovation – the “gatekeepers” who can make or break new ideas. These people aren’t cartoon villains. They’re often acting out of fear about budgets, risk, or their own roles. Boult explains how to identify them early, understand their motivations, and design an innovation process that works with – rather than around – those emotional realities.

For frustrated “intrapreneurs” who feel like they’re “going mad” inside a big company, Boult offers a practical playbook for testing startup thinking without immediately quitting the day job. And for senior leaders, he lays out why outsourcing innovation, spinning up venture arms, or re‑branding old projects as “agile” won’t work unless the underlying incentives and governance change.

If you work in a large organisation that talks a big game on innovation but struggles to ship anything truly new, this episode is required listening. Listen to The Business of Tech wherever you get your podcasts.