Yuri Dvoinos is the Chief Innovation Officer at Aura, a leading platform dedicated to making the internet safer for families and individuals
As companies expand, innovation often becomes harder to sustain. In fact, research from MIT found that firms near the 50-employee mark experience a “valley of innovation,” where regulatory pressures actively discourage further expansion and boundary-pushing ideas.
It’s like a muscle: the bigger the company, the stiffer that muscle gets. You start off small, and everything’s fast because all you do is innovate. You’re pushing for product-market fit, finding new value and constantly trying to stay alive. But as you grow, things get slower and more bureaucratic, and the next thing you know, innovation becomes a rare thing that’s hard to grasp. I’ve seen it time and again. But here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to be this way.
I’ve spent years navigating these challenges, leading innovation at Aura, a cybersecurity company where I built a cross-functional innovation department and launched AI-powered tools used by hundreds of thousands of people. Here’s what I’ve learned about keeping innovation alive, no matter how big the company gets.
1. Embrace company limitations and innovate within constraints.
Here’s a reality check: No company, big or small, is without limitations. Especially in larger companies, you’ve got processes, compliance, bureaucracy—it all slows things down. But instead of seeing those things as obstacles, I’ve learned to view them as part of the solution.
In large organizations, innovation has to align with the business’s core priorities. I always say you need “strategic air cover.” If your project isn’t aligned with leadership priorities, it won’t get far. No matter how groundbreaking the idea is, if it doesn’t fit into the bigger picture, it won’t move forward.
Take Google, for example. They’ve launched tons of projects that didn’t make it—Google Wave, anyone? But their big wins, like AI and their search tools, had leadership backing because they aligned with Google’s long-term vision.
2. Find the right level of innovation.
Innovation isn’t one-size-fits-all. It has layers, depth and shifting perspectives. You’ve got to figure out where you are and what you need, almost like adjusting dials on a control board.
McKinsey breaks it down into horizons. Horizon one? That’s the easy stuff—small tweaks here and there that make your product or service a little better, a little smoother. Most companies love Horizon one because it’s safe, risk-free and fits into the quarterly reports.
But here’s the catch: If all you do is play it safe with incremental changes, sure, you’ll meet expectations, but you won’t push any boundaries. You’ll improve the status quo, but the big shifts—the ones that redefine your place in the market—will remain out of reach.
Horizon two? Now we’re talking about looking ahead—one to three years into the future. Here’s where you start playing with new markets or new products. Remember Uber? They kicked off with ridesharing and then jumped into food delivery with Uber Eats. They didn’t wander far from their core, but they found new value, new growth.
Then there’s Horizon three—the moonshots. Big, bold bets stretching five, maybe 10 years ahead. These are the risky ones, the emerging tech, the disruptive ideas that could flip your industry upside down. You need to balance short-term quick wins with those game-changing, long-term breakthroughs. That’s where the real magic lives.
3. Make innovation everyone’s job.
Too many companies think innovation belongs to the R&D lab or the product team, and that’s a huge mistake. Sure, those teams are critical, but real innovation? It’s collaborative. It’s when everyone—from marketing to customer support to the engineers—comes to the table. That’s where the real magic lives.
At Aura, we made it clear: Innovation isn’t limited to product launches. It’s about solving the endless stream of problems that pop up at every level of the business. Every department faces challenges—whether it’s marketing, customer service or engineering—and those challenges are golden opportunities for innovation. The best ideas often bubble up from the most unexpected places when you let people think freely.
4. Build cross-functional teams to tackle big ideas.
If you’re serious about innovation, you’ve got to build teams that can actually move. Not crawl, not tiptoe, but sprint. Overly regulated processes are the enemy of speed, and nothing kills innovation faster than waiting for approval after approval. You need a structure that cuts through the red tape like a hot knife through butter.
That’s where “tiger teams” come in—small, fierce and quick. Pull people from different departments—engineering, data science, product management—whatever it takes. One mission, one goal. Keep them independent enough that they’re not constantly begging for approvals from the higher-ups. The less they rely on other teams, the faster they can innovate.
5. Encourage experimentation and learn from failure.
Here’s the truth: most ideas? They’re not going to work. But that’s not the point. The point is you’re constantly trying, constantly experimenting, constantly learning. Always improving.
You’ve got to create a space where failure isn’t this big, terrifying monster lurking around the corner. It’s just a step in the process. Our teams are always testing, trying, pushing. And when something fails, we don’t sit around pointing fingers. We ask, “Okay, what went wrong? What can we pull from this? What’s the lesson?” Then, we go again.
Conclusion
In the end, innovation is about agility, about being open to change and about knowing what you’ve got to work with and pushing through anyway. But if you want to keep innovation alive, start by examining your constraints and challenge your teams to think differently within them.
Give people the space to come up with wild ideas and the freedom to fail—because that’s where real growth lives. Remember, the best ideas often come from unexpected places, so make room for experimentation. Sure, not every idea will land, but the ones that do? They’ll take you places you couldn’t have imagined.
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