Four corporate innovators on what happened after their role disappeared.

The call came on a Sunday, while he was still on holiday. Short and final: the venture builder is closing. All hundred-plus people, gone. He had spent years building that team, and it took one sentence to end it. When the words finally landed, his response was disbelief… ”like what?!”

His story is one of four in this piece. Each arrived at the same place by a different route. One shut herself away for weeks before she could face anyone. Another lay awake most nights for nearly a year, weighing identity against security with no clean answer in sight. A third spent two hard years rebuilding before things began to shift.

The circumstances were different. The grief underneath was the same — because it was never just a role they were losing. It was who they had been.

None of them has found another job in innovation since. But despite losing a title and the identity alongside it, all four have risen to the challenge and are now the ones reshaping how their new teams work — testing ideas with real customers, dropping weak ideas early, and getting colleagues working in ways their company hadn't tried before.

The stories below show where the skill goes once the role is gone. We've kept the names and companies out; everything else is their raw, lived-through experience.

For three years, a senior innovation leader ran the innovation function at a global home appliance company, a 55,000-person organization where innovation sat firmly on the strategic agenda.

When she arrived, it was just a small team. She turned it into a hub, built around two arms that worked closely together: a venture studio that built new businesses, and programs-and-partnerships arm that ran near-term innovation alongside the core business while pulling in startups and universities for outside capability.

The KPIs were met. The quarterly reviews went well. There was always something to show the board. But in 2024, the ground started to shift under her function.

New leadership came in suddenly. The company took on a merger it could not afford without cuts. And the longer-term bets her team had been set up to chase, the non-core ventures of horizon two and three, no longer matched where the market was actually going.

Downsizing reached every function in the company, and hers was one of the units the board chose to discontinue. None of this came as a surprise to her. She had read the signals early, and as the function's leader she had already drafted a new org chart: a smaller team, with some of her people moved into other parts of the business where they would be safe. But the company's wider restructuring, the thing that would have opened those spots, was slow. The board closed her unit before she could move anyone.

She shut down the function she had built, and let her own people go. The memory still stings: “nobody starts a function, transforms it, builds it, hires people, and then has to fire them”.

Losing her own title was hurtful.

She calls the whole thing an "ego bruising experience."

However, she found letting go of her team the hardest part. They were performing well. They believed in the brand and in the work, and she had to sit them down and tell them the function no longer existed. For weeks afterward she felt, as she admits, depressed. She shut herself away for two or three weeks before she could face anyone again.

After those first painful weeks, she did what she's always done when things fall apart: she built something. "This is the muscle which keeps me alive," she says. For her, that's never been about a title or a job. It's the thing she reaches for when everything else is up in the air: “make something, anything, and you're moving again.”

In fact, this was not the first time things had gone wrong for her. Years earlier in Finland, she had returned from maternity leave to find her headcount gone, and she had survived that too. “As long as I can breathe”, she says, “there is hope”. She calls herself a paranoid optimist: she does her homework, runs her scenarios, and still trusts things will turn out fine.

She already had an idea in her back pocket, one she'd spotted during her innovation years and never let go. Within two or three months of walking out the door, she built it into a working prototype and ran the first tests. Then she handed it to her husband, an entrepreneur, who reshaped it and turned it into a company that's still going today.

In parallel, an offer came from a place she had known for years. Twenty-six years earlier she had been an engineer at a telecom software company, back when it was a scrappy young startup and she was out in the field writing code, running installs, training the customers herself. The founders never forgot her. So when they decided to build a new role in 2025, the first thing they looked for wasn't a résumé: it was someone they could trust.

She did not step into a ready-made role. What excited her was that it had not existed before her: they hired her, and she wrote her own job description. That, she remembers, “was very, very cool”. Sitting down with the CEO and the senior leadership team, she built a go-to-market strategy function from scratch, one that would own growth strategy, competitor intelligence, and foresight work. Later it took on partnerships and alliances too.

Although her title no longer said innovation, the work itself was clearly built out of it.

The first test was the go-to-market playbook. The company already had something it called a playbook — which was, in actual fact, a loose pile of documents. She established a proper one with the team: a structured guide for keeping product strategy and market strategy aligned.

The team, consisting of software engineers who wanted everything perfect before release, balked when she pushed to test a rough version with real customers and internal sales reps first. They were nervous. They had never put anything unfinished in front of a user.

But the innovation lead held her ground. She ran the playbook. The team watched it evolve, and only then did they refine it toward a full rollout. They saw it improve in front of them. After that first success, she set KPIs for the playbook, tracked them, and was always ready to pull the plug herself before anyone above her had to.

Her method spread. When HR wanted to roll out a new OKR tool, they pulled together a small pilot team and interviewed them first. It was the same lean validation she had modeled, a model no-one thought to call innovation.

If you're the one watching your function get questioned, don't be alarmed. The skills you built are yours to keep. They follow you into the next role, even when your title is not the one you held for years.

The proof sits in what the company now has: a real go-to-market playbook where there had been none, a product and market strategy that gets validated before it ships, and a lean-testing habit running in functions that never had one. The skill didn't leave when the title did. It just waited for somewhere new to land.

Everything started when the questions dried up. People who had once pushed back on a plan now nodded it through. Objectives still carried the word innovation on paper, but the work underneath had quietly become business as usual: hit the target, report the operational KPI, move to the next one. Failure, once treated as information, was no longer welcome at the table.

A product manager with close to 30 years in this field, she started back in the days when neither "innovation management" nor "product management" was even a discipline yet.

The decline she experienced had no single moment, no meeting, and no leadership change she can point to. It was, in her words, "a gradual fizzling down and degrading" of the mindset, and of the culture around it. So when the questions went quiet around 2024, she recognized it for what it was, and she recognized something harder to admit: she had started going along with it.

For a while, she played the doer. "Deliver this by that date," no debate. She had carried that posture before as a consultant, where the client's deadline was the law, and the daily pressure was to deliver results without questioning whether they were the right results. But the part of her that broke problems into pieces and tested assumptions, the part she actually valued, was going quiet.

She is careful about the word she uses to describe herself. "I don't necessarily call myself an innovator," she says. "I'm a creative thinker." And that creative thinker, she felt, "was slowly dying."

The decision to leave took a full year. It didn’t happen overnight and the dilemma kept her up, evening after evening. Did she want this for herself, or was she, in her own words, "just happy paying the mortgage"?

That is the quiet cost: the months of weighing identity against security with no clean answer. When she finally decided, the relief was immediate. "It was very liberating," she says. She left on a Friday and started her new life on Monday.

The days after, "I didn't look back at all," she remembers.

She is a keen networker, and across the years she has stayed close to people in the innovation community, comparing notes, trading advice, getting the occasional "I know someone looking for a person exactly like you." One of those long-standing relationships was with a startup, and by the time she finished her old role, the path was already laid.

The difference, she says, was "like night to day." Walking back into a startup felt like "going home." Everything she had wanted was suddenly there: the openness, the mindset, the appetite to build. She was happy again, reigniting the side of herself that had gone quiet.

The title she landed on was Strategic Advisor, chosen mostly because no cleaner label captured the truth: she was there to contribute wherever she was needed. She now works across process innovation, product innovation, and the area she thinks she adds the most, business model innovation, pushing the company up the value chain toward higher-impact work.

Nobody there calls the work innovation. In a startup it is not a separate function to manage. You just build, fast, with the resources you have, and that mindset runs through everyone. Her founders answered her questions instead of deflecting them, and she calls herself "lucky" for landing somewhere the innovator's mindset was already ingrained at the top. The change from her old world was in the question itself: not "what do we deliver by when," but "why are we doing this at all."

The product manager keeps her innovation background off the table. She does not announce that she is curious; the million questions she asks in any conversation make that obvious. What she carries into a non-innovation role is the discipline underneath the creativity: a process for where to start. Her standing conviction is to never start with an idea, but with a problem. Solve the wrong problem and the whole journey is wasted, however good the execution.

That discipline shows up in how she works day to day. Mapping assumptions before committing. Questioning whether the assumptions are even the right ones, and which ones are missing. Refusing the most common trap she sees in companies, large and small: assuming you already know what the customer wants instead of getting out of the building to ask them.

Now, she spends her days running assumptions through LLMs to test them cheaply, and for the first time she experiments with physical materials, deciding which problem needs a digital tool and which needs a physical one. Pulling an analogy from one industry into a problem sitting in another is the part she finds most rewarding.

The startup got a lopsided deal. For the cost of one advisor, a small company with limited resources gained a 30-year operator who could pull it up the value chain into business model innovation, a move most companies never attempt. She also installs a discipline most startups skip: no experiment burns resources until someone has proven it solves a real problem.

Her advice to anyone caught in the same questioning is the same move that freed her: do not go through it alone. Talk to your network, your community, the other innovators who will either tell you it passes or point you somewhere better.

"Life is short. Don't stay suffering," she says. If you truly love innovation, go where it is welcome, and where you can thrive. The hardest part wasn't leaving. It was the year she spent not leaving.

About seven years ago, a large manufacturer, under competitive pressure to digitalize, tried something it had never done: it pulled people from strategy, product, and R&D into a single five-person team and told them to find the company's next business. The design-thinking expert on the team set how they worked: start from the customer's problem, not the company's idea.

What had pulled her into this work in the first place was never the function, or even the word "innovation." It was, she says, "the opportunity to live many different lives through the experiences of others": to step into someone else's world, uncover needs they couldn't always put into words, and build something better out of what she found.

One of the concepts they brought back landed well enough to earn the green light to build a dedicated innovation management department from scratch. She built the department, alongside her old boss, and ran it.

That meant recruiting the team, designing the stage-gate process, and building a way of working that ran experiments across the company's strategic search fields, killed what didn't move, and handed the survivors into the core business to scale. For three years she ran it hands-on as the innovation coach; then, as it grew into a full product trio of designers and engineers, she stepped up to lead it.

There was, she remembers, "a lot of excitement" in those early days, and "a lot of political air coverage" to go with it. What gave her energy was "that messy creative front end where you don't yet know the answer": running the interviews, facilitating the workshops, testing the ideas, staying close to the customer.

Six years went by. And then trouble came.

Political capital started running thin, and once theirs began to drain, everything downstream went with it. What had started true to the essence of innovation, in her words, "disintegrated into more theater": as more people climbed on to steer, the work grew bureaucratic and slow, until the freedom it began with was gone.

Then the weakening economy finished off what was left of the unit. The company had boomed through the pandemic, but when that surge passed it was left with excess capacity and a downturn. And when a squeeze like this comes, innovation is the first thing to feel it.

Then came the hard part: laying off her colleagues.

As a first-time manager, she did everything "from hiring all the way to firing," barely supported by HR. The most difficult part for her was the layoff criteria. “What do you base the choice on? Performance? Who has young children at home?” She had to take on the burden of figuring that out. There was no perfect solution: "everything will feel wrong to the other side."

Word leaked before the formal meetings, and when people asked why she hadn't warned them sooner, her answer was that telling them on a Friday "would have robbed you of your sleep over the weekend." Through the negotiations she felt stuck in between, representing the company at the table while fighting behind closed doors for the best package for her people.

When it was over, morale company-wide was "down the dumps," and no one had much "urge anymore to innovate." In the thick of that low, she admits, part of her half-wished the company would just hand her a severance package and take the decision out of her hands.

When that didn’t happen, she went looking for the old spark herself, spending two months in Shanghai and trying to set up a new unit there. But between her family situation and the lack of support on the ground to actually build it, that didn't work either. After about a year and a half, and after cutting her own team, she made the painful decision and left on her own terms.

"I grieved and eventually left," she says. "I think I was grieving an identity, not my position." For years she had been the innovation person, and she wasn't sure who she would be without the title.

What came next, after the exit and the cuts, was two genuinely hard years of finding her footing. The whole stretch had the shape of a midlife reckoning: should she have taken the leap at all, or stayed somewhere secure and a little bored? The market had tightened, innovation funding had dried up, and employers now expected the AI fluency she was still building after a career in hardware. Product roles meant travel she couldn't take on with a family, remote work was thinning, and even freelancing was its own crunch.

None of it was glamorous. Freelancing meant running her own books, chasing her own clients, and growing the "thick face”, as she says, to cold-message strangers on LinkedIn. She questioned herself constantly, and there were stretches where the path forward was messy.

The opening came when she stopped chasing an innovation title and asked instead which of her skills actually carried over.

An agency placing freelancers on nonprofit projects took her on, and the assignments turned out to be innovation in everything - except the title.

In her most recent project she spent three weeks in rural Kenya, doing the deep discovery any innovation professional would recognize: sitting with a farmer to understand his day, his motivations and his hard constraints. The setting had changed; the method hadn't.

That instinct is exactly what she now carries into roles that aren't called innovation. The design thinker doesn't sell her background as a credential; as she puts it, "innovation fits no hiring bucket". What she sells instead is the craft underneath: deep empathy for whoever's problem she's solving, the curiosity and unbiased interviewing to surface it, and the ability to turn messy qualitative insight into something concrete, its assumptions named and its scenarios mapped.

This isn't a story about taking the leap. She still asks herself whether she should have stayed, and she means it: with a mortgage or a family, staying put can be exactly the right call, and there's no shame in it.

The real lesson, she reflects, was "learning to separate who I am and what I love doing from the title on my LinkedIn profile." Once she stopped hunting for another innovation role and started looking for the parts of the work that gave her energy, things began to shift. Those two hard years, she thinks now, were less about finding her next job than about "finding my way back to myself, however cliché that sounds."

In 2018, a venture building lead joined a large retailer with a mandate of two words: do it.

The company was profitable and restless. Beyond its supermarkets it owned a bank, a health business, and one of the country's biggest online stores, and it wanted to invest that profit into building something new. So it launched a venture studio to build and scale new businesses from scratch, put a growth-equity team of eight people beside it to invest in outside companies, and hired him as chief venture officer to run the building side. This was no innovation theater. "We wanted to make money," he says. "That was the goal."

He started the team with twelve people. Within a few years he had thirty-five builders. They worked across everything the parent touched: food, e-commerce, health, fintech, travel, and had a dedicated team for each.

Their real strength as a unit was in killing ideas fast. They prototyped about a hundred ideas a year, took roughly twenty to MVP, and funded the two that earned a Series A. Everything else, they stopped. "We stopped rigorously," he says. "Out of a hundred, only a few made it to the end of the year."

The model worked. Several ventures hit seven figures in revenue within their first year or two, and the goal was always bigger: build businesses that could scale into real contributors to the parent. Three are still in business today, even though the unit that built them no longer exists. One has grown into a mid-eight-figure company with a hundred employees of its own.

From the start, the studio sat apart from the parent: its own office, its own people, and a direct line to the CEO. Inside the corporation, he says, they were "the aliens” — living by their own rules.

And that was the whole point. A venture builder is supposed to sit outside the machine. This held, as long as the CEO who created it was there to back it.

The old CEO hired him. The new CEO fired him.

But he was not the only one affected. The new leadership closed the whole unit, all hundred-plus people. He was coming back from holiday when it happened.

On a Sunday, the phone rang. The venture builder is closing. His response was disbelief: "Like, what?"

Under Swiss law, a four-week period kicked in, meant for finding a way to save the unit. “But there was no saving it”, he says, “when the CEO wanted it gone”.

He signed the termination papers himself. Then he stayed six months to take the company apart: a team of six, down from a hundred, closing the books, selling off the ventures and the assets, switching off the lights. "A horrible time," he says. "And not just then. Even afterward."

The long wind-down was almost a mercy. His colleagues from out of town had a two-month notice period and then were simply gone. His six months gave him time the rest never got: time to close the company down properly, and then to step away before deciding anything.

He took a break, and stopped caring about what came next. He flew to Brazil and traveled for two months. For the first two or three weeks he could not bring himself to talk to anyone. Slowly, his social energy came back.

His outplacement counselor asked what he wanted to do next. He told her the truth: he wanted to go back to his old job, even though he knew it was impossible.

After those first difficult weeks, an old boss, who knew he was on the market, called with a job offer he would normally have refused flat: head of a business unit at an old-school company, “slow and boring”, the kind of place he had spent his career fighting. What changed his mind was the pitch. "We want the company to adjust to you," the boss told him. "Don't adjust to the company. Be yourself."

Still not ready for anything permanent, he told himself this new role was temporary. He said yes, and decided to give it two years.

On paper, the role had nothing to do with innovation. What he brought to it did.

He found the unit the way he had found the whole company: slow, angry, the culture being “it’s not our problem”. The products were bad, the prices too high and the IT was hopeless.

So he kicked off the work as an innovator would. Before fixing anything, he built psychological safety, asking people what gave them a headache. Then he swapped all the excuses for what he calls a "pirate mindset," which is really the venture builders’ mindset: “we are the business, we sell the product, and if we need something we go and ask for it, and we ask louder when asking does not work.”

This thinking reshaped the product.

For example, the unit ran an e-commerce site that still looked like it was from the early 2000s, and a redesign was already on the table. Colleagues kept asking what he thought of it. He asked them what the customers thought. The room went quiet: which customers? Nobody had ever spoken to one. "If there are no customers," he told them, "we have a completely different problem than just a website."

Within a few weeks the site was rebuilt, this time around what real users said. Talking to customers, running experiments, treating a failure as information instead of a fireable mistake: none of it had ever been tried in the company before.

Not everyone agreed, and he still faces resistance. He reads any organization as roughly a third hungry for change, a third set against it, and a middle to be won.

He is still on his way to winning that middle.

Two years in, the team he leads is, by his own account, "the happiest team of the whole company," because he runs it like a venture builder. "They see the spark," he says. "They see the passion."

Asked how an innovation background helps in a job that is not about innovation, he answers directly: “Everyone talks about agility and failing forward”. "But they don't know what it is. I feel it, because I did it.”

That conviction carried him through the new role, when the job did not feel like his. In the first week he kept asking what he was even doing there. A month in, he still felt the pull to back out the door. Each time, he reminded himself of the line his boss had hired him on: do not adjust to the company, adjust the company to you.

The proof is in the numbers. The unit had been shrinking 6 to 7% a year since the pandemic peak. He stopped the decline: revenue is flat now, holding steady instead of falling, with 30% fewer people and far more to show for the work. The company took a chance on a venture builder who refused to become one of them, and got back a business pulled out of decline by someone who stayed exactly who he was.

That’s it for today.

If you’re in the same boat, hope this was a bit helpful. Next week, we’ll look at working with weak signals for disruptive innovation, when our usual management tools filter for certainty, prioritize bets backed by strong evidence, and protect the portfolio from unproven risk.

Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Chief @ Innov8rs

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