Top 5 Challenges in Corporate Innovation: Practical Lessons from Professionals

A real-world conversation with three seasoned corporate innovation practitioners, moderated by Colin Nelson, exploring the toughest challenges they’ve faced in their careers and the practical solutions that helped them overcome them.

What if your innovation program was built around the real blockers practitioners face instead of an ideal textbook world? In this knowledge session, Colin Nelson (Chief Innovation Consultant, HYPE) hosted three innovation leaders who shared how they’re tackling those issues on the ground:

• Isabelle Armand-Guerineau (Strategic Transformation Director at Thales)

• Caitlin Lawrence (Manager of Training & Development Innovation at Birla Carbon)

• Monika Jasłowska (Transformation Advisor at Polpharma)

Use this summary for a fast read or watch the recording for the full stories, Q&A, and examples.

Why These Challenges Matter and What’s at Stake

• If IP concerns aren’t addressed early, collaboration with universities and external partners stalls, blocking access to ideas, research, and emerging talent.

• If university partnerships aren’t structured as win-wins, companies miss out on diverse thinking, and academic partners lose motivation to participate, weakening future collaboration pipelines.

• If leaders aren’t visible advocates, innovation loses momentum, employees disengage, and creativity stays hidden instead of driving business value.

• If innovation impact isn’t measured, leadership can’t see progress, support fades, and innovation risks being dismissed as “nice to have” instead of strategic.

• If innovation can’t scale beyond a small central team, promising ideas die early, bottlenecks grow, and the organization struggles to turn creativity into real outcomes.

What’s at stake: the ability to collaborate externally, inspire internally, prove value, and scale innovation sustainably, core capabilities every modern organization needs to stay competitive.

The panel focused on how to work with these constraints and still progress.

Five Core Challenges and How Practitioners are Tackling Them

1. Clearing Intellectual Property Concerns Early (Thales)

The Challenge: IP was a major blocker to open collaboration:

• Who owns student-generated ideas?
• How do publication timelines affect patents?
• How do different university legal teams interpret IP rules?

These issues nearly stopped several universities from participating.

How They Overcame It: Thales brought in the Innovation and IP departments from the start. Together they developed a clear IP framework:

• Students could later publish academic papers after patent checks.
• University legal teams reviewed simplified agreements.
• Thales allowed universities to join only if comfortable, no pressure.
  

Example: Instead of six universities, only two universities moved forward, those aligned with the IP framework. This smaller but solid partnership made the project smoother and more productive.

Lessons Learned

• Engage IP/legal teams early—but keep the process simple.

• Transparency builds trust with universities.

• It’s better to work with fewer willing partners than force misaligned ones.

2. Co-creating with Academic Partners: Design-Thinking in Practice (Thales)

The Challenge: Thales wanted to collaborate with universities to run design-thinking hackathons. The difficulty was shaping a partnership that delivered value both to the company (fresh ideas, future talent) and to universities (academic relevance, student development). Many universities also had different expectations about how structured or open the collaboration should be.

How They Overcame It: Thales involved professors early and co-created the challenge themes. They aligned expectations, clarified what Thales needed (e.g., AI, cybersecurity challenges), and ensured each topic also supported academic learning objectives. They also structured the hackathon so professors, students, and Thales teams understood the process and outcomes.

Example: Participation grew from 40 students in year 1 to over 100 students as the partnership strengthened. Universities even proposed adding social and environmental elements to challenges, which Thales integrated—strengthening the “win-win” dynamic.

Lessons Learned

• Start with small, low-risk collaborations to build trust.
• Co-create challenge themes instead of dictating them.
• Align business needs with academic motivations for long-term success.

3. Turning Leaders into Innovation Advocates (Birla Carbon)

The Challenge: Innovation struggled because leadership support was inconsistent. When leaders faded out, employee engagement dropped. The goal was to turn leadership into visible, active advocates for innovation across all global sites.

How They Overcame It: Birla Carbon launched a global Innovation Roadshow, where leaders:

• Joined workshops at every manufacturing site.

• Sat with employees in idea-generation sessions.
• Listened to pitch presentations.
• Selected ideas that aligned with strategy and offered sponsorship.

Leaders received coaching to help them engage and encourage employees in the right way.

Example: All senior leaders attended at least one Roadshow event, and the CEO attended nearly all. This visibility significantly changed how employees perceived leadership’s commitment to innovation.

Lessons Learned

• Leadership’s physical presence has a powerful cultural impact.
• Advocacy grows when leaders witness employee creativity firsthand.
• When leaders sponsor ideas, employees feel trusted and motivated.

4. Proving Innovation Impact Through Metrics (Birla Carbon)

The Challenge: Leadership wanted concrete proof of innovation’s value, beyond ideas and workshops:

• How is culture shifting?
• Which sites are most engaged?
• What financial value is being created?

Innovation needed data to speak the language of leadership.

How They Overcame It: Birla Carbon built a data-driven measurement system with HYPE that included:

• A business-intelligence dashboard linked to their innovation platform.
• Metrics on idea flow, engagement, financial impact, and site comparison.
• Biennial innovation culture surveys.
• Quarterly reports for site leaders.

Example: Sites began receiving performance dashboards showing how they ranked globally. This not only gave leaders visibility but also encouraged healthy competition and more proactive participation.

Lessons Learned:

• Data builds trust and eliminates “innovation theatre.”
• Dashboards help leaders see real progress and make better decisions.
• Measuring both culture and outcomes provides a full picture of impact.

5. Scaling Innovation Through an Internal Champion Network (Polpharma)

The Challenge: Polpharma’s innovation team was very small (1.5 people), making it impossible to support hundreds of ideas across 5 sites and multiple countries. There was no way to scale coaching, idea development, or portfolio management with such limited capacity.

How They Overcame It: They created the Academy of Innovation Leads, a volunteer network of 34 employees from across departments. Each volunteer dedicates 10% of their time to innovation.

These champions were trained in:

They meet regularly, mentor idea teams, and help run challenges.

Example: Champions organized themselves into six functional groups (e.g., Innovation Project Management, Innovation Excellence, Open Innovation). Some have already begun shifting their careers toward formal innovation roles.

Lessons Learned

• A distributed network scales innovation far better than a central team.

• Volunteers bring passion, diversity, and cross-functional insights.

• Community-building is essential, people stay engaged when they feel part of something meaningful.

Practical Examples & Evidence

• Start with manageable, lower-risk pilots to build trust with universities, leadership, and internal communities.

• Close the feedback loop for everyone involved: students, employees, managers, and partners.

• Make innovation visible both ways: leaders see frontline creativity; employees see that leaders pay attention and act.

Quick Action Checklist (for Leaders)

Define your external IP model: Clarify how IP works for short sprints vs longer projects with universities/startups, and let partners opt in or out. 

 Put leaders in the room with real problems: Involve senior leaders in workshops and pitch sessions where they select and sponsor ideas tied to strategy.

 Measure culture, not just ideas: Run periodic innovation/engagement survey and share results as input for leadership decisions.

 Build simple, credible metrics: Create a small dashboard that shows pipeline, impact (where possible), and engagement by site/region.

 Grow a distributed innovation community: Recruit and train local innovation leads with clear time allocation and responsibilities (coaching, challenge design, comms).

 Recognize contribution, not just big wins: Highlight leaders and employees who support, mentor, and move ideas forward, not only those who launch “hero” projects.

How this lifts engagement and performance

These practices consistently boost both participation and outcomes:

• Employees feel heard and supported, increasing idea flow and ownership.

• Leadership sees real progress through clear data and visibility.

• Ideas move faster thanks to coaching, sponsorship, and structured processes.

• Distributed innovation roles strengthen collaboration across sites and teams.

The result: a more engaged workforce and a more reliable innovation pipeline.

Want to go deeper?

If you’d like to tackle these challenges inside your own organization, from strengthening leadership support to building innovation capability or managing external collaboration with confidence, HYPE offers a free consultation and a short Innovation Management Assessment to benchmark maturity and identify prioritized next steps.