Big Companies Don't Have an Innovation Problem. They Have a Speed Problem.

Every boardroom has a version of the same reassuring story: we've bought the AI tools, we've run the pilots, we have an innovation strategy. Itai Green has spent his career watching that story end badly. The tools were never the point, and neither was the strategy deck. The thing that quietly kills big organisations is not a shortage of ideas, it's the speed at which they can actually act on them, and most are far too slow to survive what's coming.

This week on the Project Flux podcast, Itai Green — open-innovation veteran and author of Innovation or Elimination — makes the case that the real divide isn't between companies with good ideas and bad ones. It's between the ones that can engage the startup ecosystem at speed and the ones whose own culture, KPIs and bureaucracy guarantee they'll arrive late to every shift that matters.

🎧 Short on time? Hit play here — a brisk, practical conversation about why engaging with startups beats building everything in-house, and how to stop your own organisation from getting in the way.

Green's starting point is uncomfortable for incumbents. Startups don't out-innovate large companies because they're smarter; they out-innovate them because they're faster, and because nothing in their structure punishes speed. Inside a big organisation the opposite is true, the inertia, the sign-off chains and the culture of not getting it wrong all conspire to slow the one thing that now decides who stays relevant. He points to how quickly tools like Wix and a new wave of AI platforms have rewritten what a small team can build in a weekend, and how badly that exposes anyone still moving at committee pace.

His fix is unglamorous but concrete: stop trying to invent everything internally and start systematically engaging with the ecosystem, scouting startups, running fast, cheap pilots, and giving leadership real skin in the process rather than delegating "innovation" to a team with no authority. The hard part isn't finding the technology, he argues; it's rewiring the KPIs and the management mindset so that moving quickly is rewarded instead of quietly penalised.

What lands hardest is where he takes it at the end. The pace of AI development isn't going to wait for anyone's transformation roadmap, and the companies that keep treating innovation as an annual initiative rather than a standing capability are, in his framing, choosing elimination without realising it. Staying aware of what's emerging and being willing to act on it before it's safe has stopped being a nice-to-have.

Why it matters: this generalises straight to construction, consulting, surveying and every delivery business watching AI reshape its market. The winners won't be the ones with the biggest AI budget. They'll be the ones who can see a shift, engage the people already building for it, and move — before the slower incumbents have finished writing the strategy.

👉 Listen to the full conversation with Itai Green here.

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