The Real Reason Corporate Innovation Moves So Slowly

Hey there, I’m Dima. I work at the intersection of corporate innovation and startup ecosystems. As Head of Gcore for Startups and the founder of PitchBob.io, an AI copilot for entrepreneurs, I’ve spent years helping corporations, accelerators and early-stage founders navigate the complex path from ideas to scalable ventures.

And one challenge keeps surfacing across every sector and geography: how to run pilots without being trapped by IT infrastructure and procurement drama.

Innovation inside large organizations has always been a paradox. On the one hand, corporates are under immense pressure to reinvent themselves, experiment with new technologies and collaborate with startups. On the other hand, the very structures that make them stable — governance, compliance, procurement — often make them painfully slow to adapt.

Nowhere is this paradox more visible than in the way corporations run pilots and proof-of-concepts (PoCs).

Related: Why Most Corporate Innovation Programs Fail — and How to Fix Them

The procurement trap

For corporate innovation managers, the script is painfully familiar. A business unit wants to test an AI model that promises to improve customer retention. Or a startup partner proposes a predictive maintenance tool. Everyone agrees it’s worth exploring. And then … the process begins.

Infrastructure requests go into IT queues. Procurement sends out paperwork. Legal insists on contract reviews. Finance blocks spending because budgets are locked until the next cycle. What should have been a two-week experiment stretches into six months of bureaucracy. By the time the infrastructure is finally approved, the market opportunity may already have passed.

I have spoken to innovation leaders across finance, healthcare, telecom and industrials, and the frustration is universal. The barrier isn’t ideas or talent — it’s infrastructure procurement.

Why this matters

When corporates can only run a handful of pilots each year, innovation becomes a lottery. The odds of finding scalable winners shrink, while the costs of failed large-scale projects rise. Conversely, when companies can run dozens of small, fast, low-risk pilots, the economics change completely.

Innovation is, at its core, a portfolio game. More experiments mean more learning, more validated insights and more shots on goal. The problem is that traditional IT and procurement models were never designed for this kind of experimentation. They were built for stability, not agility.

A shift in thinking

Over the past few years, I’ve observed a quiet but important shift. Some corporates are moving away from treating infrastructure as a barrier and instead positioning it as an enabler. They are decoupling pilots from heavy procurement cycles, setting up dedicated frameworks that allow innovation units to spin up experiments quickly, without starting from scratch every time.

This shift requires a new mindset: infrastructure not as a static asset, but as a service layer for innovation. Instead of saying, “Let’s request a budget and wait for approval,” the question becomes, “How can we test this idea safely, legally and cheaply within days?”

Related: Your Business Is Never Too Big to Be as Nimble as a Startup

Emerging models

Different models are emerging to make this possible. Some corporations build internal “innovation sandboxes” — pre-approved environments where pilots can run with relaxed procurement and IT oversight. Others partner with cloud or edge providers who design specific offers for innovation units, providing temporary infrastructure allocations that are enterprise-ready but free from the usual bottlenecks.

The key characteristics of these models are consistent: one-time vendor approval instead of repeating the cycle for each pilot, governance and compliance built in from the start and the ability to scale successful pilots on the same contractual framework without renegotiations.

Lessons from the ecosystem

One interesting example I’ve seen recently comes from Gcore, a leading European cloud and edge provider. They’ve been working with corporates and accelerators to rethink how pilots are run. Instead of asking innovation managers to fight for budget every time, they created a framework where infrastructure for initial PoCs is pre-cleared and available at no cost.

The value here isn’t just in saving money. It’s in saving time. Corporate innovators can run ten pilots in parallel instead of two. They can work with startups without forcing them into months of compliance checks. And they can kill weak ideas quickly while doubling down on winners.

This kind of model illustrates how infrastructure can move from being a blocker to being a strategic accelerator of innovation. And while Gcore is one example, the broader point is that corporates now have options. They don’t need to accept procurement delays as a fact of life.

Why now?

The timing of this shift is not accidental. AI and data-heavy workloads are pushing the boundaries of traditional infrastructure. Training a large model, testing generative AI in customer service or running simulations for predictive analytics all require compute-intensive environments. These are not pilots that can wait six months.

At the same time, pressure from boards and shareholders has intensified. Everyone wants measurable ROI from innovation budgets. That means faster cycles, clearer reporting and more disciplined scaling. The old model — slow approvals, big upfront spending and few experiments — simply doesn’t work anymore.

The way forward

What I find most encouraging is that this isn’t just a technology conversation. It’s an organizational one. By rethinking how infrastructure is provisioned, corporates are also rethinking how they collaborate with startups, how they structure their internal innovation teams and how they govern experimentation at scale.

Imagine an innovation office that can onboard a startup partner in days instead of months. Imagine running 20 pilots across different business units in parallel, with clear visibility into outcomes and costs. Imagine scaling the three that work — while shutting down the 17 that don’t — with no drama, no wasted millions and no bruised reputations.

That is the future of corporate innovation. And it starts with breaking the procurement trap.

Related: 5 Key Ingredients for Corporate Innovation

If there’s one message I would share with every corporate innovator, it is this: Don’t let bureaucracy decide which ideas live or die. Infrastructure doesn’t have to be a blocker. With the right models, it can be the very thing that unlocks speed, scale and impact.

The companies that figure this out will not just innovate faster. They will innovate smarter. And in today’s markets, that difference is everything.

In my own work — from building AI tools for entrepreneurs to supporting corporates through the Gcore for Startups program — I’ve seen both sides of the innovation equation. Startups bring speed and creativity, but they struggle to navigate corporate structures. Corporations bring resources and market power, but they struggle to move fast. Bridging that gap is not just a tactical challenge; it’s a strategic imperative.

The organizations that succeed will be those that redesign not just their technology stack, but their approach to experimentation itself. They will treat infrastructure as an enabler, not a hurdle — and in doing so, they will give innovation the space to thrive.

Hey there, I’m Dima. I work at the intersection of corporate innovation and startup ecosystems. As Head of Gcore for Startups and the founder of PitchBob.io, an AI copilot for entrepreneurs, I’ve spent years helping corporations, accelerators and early-stage founders navigate the complex path from ideas to scalable ventures.

And one challenge keeps surfacing across every sector and geography: how to run pilots without being trapped by IT infrastructure and procurement drama.

Innovation inside large organizations has always been a paradox. On the one hand, corporates are under immense pressure to reinvent themselves, experiment with new technologies and collaborate with startups. On the other hand, the very structures that make them stable — governance, compliance, procurement — often make them painfully slow to adapt.