Why Leaders in Innovation Must Learn to Manage the Pressure

In this talk, Oana Maria-Pop explores why innovation success in large organizations has less to do with size and more to do with how leaders manage tension. She unpacks four recurring paradoxes that shape effective innovation programs.

I work closely with organizations of all sizes across industries and regions. And no matter how big or established they are, the same questions always surface. 

Are we structured the right way? 
Are we innovating fast enough without breaking what works? 

Size is often assumed to be an advantage: More resources, more credibility, more scale. Yet in practice, innovation success rarely correlates with size alone. 

What makes the difference is something else: the ability to hold opposing forces at the same time. Stability and change. Rules and experimentation. Safe bets and bold moves. 

Over time, I’ve seen that the organizations making real progress aren’t the ones that resolve these tensions, but the ones that learn how to work within them. 

The Size Paradox: Big Is Credible, Small Is Effective 

Large organizations often assume scale should naturally lead to innovation success. More people, more budget, more expertise. The reality is that size alone rarely drives impact. 

What matters is structure. 

The University of Cambridge offers a useful example. Its credibility comes from scale and history. But its innovation strength comes from how that scale is broken down—into smaller, focused units that stay close to research, industry, and execution. 

Big creates trust. Small creates speed. 

Innovation stalls when everything operates under the same rules, timelines, and incentives as the core business. It accelerates when small teams are given clear mandates, autonomy, and proximity to real problems. 

The organizations that move fastest don’t try to innovate at scale—they design small, specialized structures inside the larger system, allowing credibility and execution to coexist without competing. 

The Conformity Paradox:  Rules Protect the Business, but Innovation Needs Space to Bend Them

In large organizations, conformity isn’t a flaw. Standards exist to protect quality, safety, and trust, especially in regulated industries. 

But innovation doesn’t happen by following every rule everywhere. For many leaders, the concern isn’t experimentation itself—it’s what happens when boundaries become unclear. 

The key is separation. 

At AkzoNobel, the core business remained tightly governed. In parallel, Paint the Future — an open innovation program designed to invite external partners into structured experimentation—created a sanctioned space for exploration without putting  day-to-day operations at risk. 

That distinction matters. Innovation slows when new ideas are forced to operate under the same constraints as day-to-day operations. 

What this means for innovation leaders: 

• Keep Horizon 1 innovation compliant and reliable. 

• Create explicit spaces where non-conformity is allowed. 

• Use standards and sustainability goals as guardrails, not constraints. 

Conformity protects credibility. Selective rule-bending enables progress. 

The Betting Paradox: Safe Bets Sustain the Business, Wild Cards Transform It 

Large organizations default to safe bets. Clear ROI. Predictable outcomes. That keeps the business running, but it rarely changes its trajectory. 

Breakthroughs come from controlled risk. Not risk for its own sake, but deliberate exploration anchored in real customer insight. 

When IKEA struggled in unfamiliar markets, the response wasn’t more forecasting. It was proximity. Home visits. Direct observation of how people actually live. 

That shift led to the Open Home platform, a structured way to capture real behaviors and unmet needs at scale. Safe bets sustained the core. Wild cards, grounded in customer reality, reshaped future decisions. 

Practical implications: 

• Use safe bets to protect today’s business. 

• Use wild cards to explore tomorrow’s opportunities. 

• Customer proximity reduces risk better than prediction alone. 

• AI can structure insights, but judgment remains human. 

The goal isn’t betting blindly—it’s choosing where risk is worth taking. 

The Stability Paradox:  Steadfast Organizations Still Need Agility 

Stability is one of the greatest strengths of large organizations. Established processes, long-term funding, and institutional memory create resilience, especially in uncertain times. 

But stability without agility slows learning. 

A clear example comes from innovation efforts within the United Nations. The organization is built to be reliable and consistent by design. That steadiness is essential. Yet when innovation depends on fragmented funding and isolated teams, progress stalls. 

The breakthrough came when multiple NGOs pooled resources to jointly fund and prototype innovation—what later became Reimagining Fundraising, a shared innovation initiative designed to rethink how fundraising models are developed and tested. Shared budgets, shared challenges, and faster experimentation replaced siloed efforts. 

The same dynamic shows up in large enterprises when business units, regions, or functions stop funding innovation in isolation and start tackling shared challenges together. 

What innovation leaders can take from this: 

• Centralized teams provide continuity. 

• Distributed teams create speed. 

• Shared challenges and pooled funding accelerate learning. 

Agility doesn’t require chaos. It requires alignment. 

The Advantage Is Knowing When Not to Choose

Innovation in large organizations doesn’t fail because leaders pick the wrong side. It fails when they feel forced to choose only one. 

Big or small. 
Stable or agile. 
Safe or bold. 

The most effective innovation programs are built by leaders who design for both sides of the paradox—intentionally. They use size for credibility and smallness for execution. Rules for protection and flexibility for discovery. Safe bets to sustain today, and wild cards to shape tomorrow.

The real competitive advantage isn’t scale, speed, or even technology. It’s the judgment to know where tension should be preserved rather than resolved. 

So the question isn’t which side are you on? 

It’s where could the opposite approach strengthen what you’re already doing?