Startups have a reputation for disruption for good reason—they’re fast-paced, agile, and have delivered some of the most innovative products of the last decade from social platforms to Generative AI. Large corporations, on the other hand, have a reputation for falling behind, beholden to bureaucracy, methodical risk analyses, and perfected processes. That said, a handful of giants, from Google to Microsoft and Meta, have bucked that trend and introduced successful innovations that offer critical lessons.
I have become a student of these examples and have focused on balancing the scale of a large financial institution with the agility of a startup to ensure the company anticipates customer needs and delivers cutting-edge products and services. This led to the creation of Amex Digital Labs, an in-house incubator that tests, builds, and launches products. Digital Labs was designed to be nimble enough to experiment with emerging technologies, while leveraging the experience and resources of the parent company, all while effectively managing risks. My team has enabled Amex to maintain momentum in innovation, across important trends such as AI, public blockchains, mobile payments, open banking, and more.
In the creation of Digital Labs, I’ve experienced first-hand the challenges and opportunities of driving innovation within a large enterprise and have advice to share with leaders in similar environments. This includes tips on ways to encourage creativity, build and scale teams, measure success, and promote strategic risk-taking to maintain a startup-like mentality, all while leveraging the benefits of a massive corporation.
Foster an environment for cross-company collaboration:
Most corporate innovation labs follow a similar playbook: separate office space, startup-style perks, and creating as much distance from the mothership as possible to foster creativity. We discovered something counterintuitive: true innovation doesn’t thrive in isolation.
I’d advise leaders to be careful not to completely silo their team, as it’s essential to work alongside key business units to leverage the strengths of a large corporation. The goal is to create an environment where employees feel empowered to lead without feeling separate or superior to the rest of the organization. This integrated approach fosters collaboration and ensures innovation is part of the company’s fabric, not an isolated effort.
Additionally, leveraging a diverse range of perspectives increases creativity and improves the chances of success. Leaders should encourage cross-company participation in pitching ideas for new products and processes, giving everyone the opportunity to build and submit ideas. This fosters an environment of inclusion and opens the door for a broader range of innovative ideas. To broaden inclusion even further, I recommend taking a blended approach to hiring, bringing in talent from within the company and externally to ensure a mix of fresh perspectives and deep institutional knowledge.
Create a culture shift to prioritize experimentation:
One of the biggest challenges in corporate innovation isn’t technology, it’s a culture of prioritizing perfectionism over experimentation. It’s important to counter this by bringing wider teams along on the innovation journey, and celebrating not just the wins, but lessons learned all while making sure that our ambition to remain at the forefront of financial innovation is coupled with an unfaltering commitment to maintain the highest levels of safety, soundness, security, and legal compliance expected of my company.
A balanced pipeline can help with this – innovation labs must focus on a mix of short-term, practical applications and ambitious “moonshot” projects. This keeps the innovation pipeline grounded in immediate customer needs while leaving room to explore transformative technologies. More importantly, this approach helps signal the value of experimentation and takes the pressure off for every moonshot to yield tangible results. Not every experiment needs to be successful with customers in the market, but they should be successful in shedding light on the learning agenda they set out to achieve.
Fail fast and outline processes for success:
Often, large corporations look at a struggling project and try to fix the problem by pouring more resources into it. I recommend the opposite approach. My team follows a staged process: greenlighting an idea for exploration, approving a pilot, and entering a period of learning and iterating with customers in the market. When product-market fit is achieved the option exists to continue the cycles of innovation or graduate the product to a business unit that has more expertise in scale.
With this, we have clear metrics for all pilots from the start. The primary measure we focus on is customer engagement— determining if customers love the product, return to it organically, and show a strong attachment. If engagement is missing, it’s often a sign that the product might not be compelling enough to continue. Coming to this conclusion and failing fast frees up resources to invest in the next round of concepts. Most importantly, this approach reduces the stigma of failure – rebranding it as a learning agenda, and a necessary component of the innovation process.
Shutting down projects can be difficult, especially for those invested in them, but it’s important to celebrate these teams for their dedication and progress and ensure that they are quickly moved to other opportunities that might bear more fruit. Know when to move on, to allow space for the next great idea.
Within a large corporation, leaders don’t need to replicate Silicon Valley to transform their approach to experimentation. The most important elements are the courage to experiment, the discipline to kill failing projects, and the humility to learn from both successes and failures.
Luke Gebb is Executive Vice President and Head of Amex Digital Labs, a global organization aiming to catalyze innovation at the company through internal product development and co-development with big tech and Fintech. Focus areas include digital wallets, QR payments, P2P, open banking, messaging platforms, voice, AI, carbon offsets, DeFi, and crypto. To date the team has implemented Send&Split, a P2P partnership with Paypal/Venmo, led numerous minority investments in start-ups as well as the acquisition and integration of Mezi, makers of a human-assisted, AI-powered travel assistant. Previously, Luke was Senior Vice President of Enterprise Digital, leading the company’s web, mobile, partner, and digital payments platforms.