Who isn’t charmed by the amazing adventure stories of “pop entrepreneurs”? They’re the ones who created what we imagine as the great technological innovations of the last century and this one. We used to talk about surnames like Musk, Gates, Jobs; today the list has been refreshed with the new protagonists of the AI industry, and we have names like Sam Altman, Alexandr Wang, or Dario Amodei — but the script is exactly the same. Though notice the irony: Amodei was a salaried researcher at Baidu, then at Google, then at OpenAI, where he rose to VP of Research, and only then did he found Anthropic; that part of the biography is almost never the one we tell. We want to know what led these personalities to change the way we live and, of course, where their ideas came from. And in fact, when we dig into their cases, many of these discoveries that changed the status quo didn’t originate in their “enlightened minds” but in the heads of employees. That’s not me saying it — it’s Kaihan Krippendorff, founder and CEO of the consulting firm Outthinker and author of the book Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs.
A pause to breathe… and look how interesting this is! I first wrote this piece a few years ago. I’ve dug it back out now, and I’ve found that not only has it not aged, it’s become more uncomfortable.
Heroes are the exception
According to Kaihan, on the lists of the most innovative entrepreneurs, we always find the same profiles. The Elons, the Bezoses, the Jobses, all the Gateses and Dells. Practically all of them with similar narratives. They got the idea in college. Sometimes they finish their degree, sometimes they don’t. They almost always hole up in their magic garages (like Google and HP did) and form a small team. Then they develop the technology, come out of the cave, share it, and disrupt everything. This story fits the hero’s journey. “Pop entrepreneurs” have an idea, set off on a quest, and have to do it alone. They usually have a mentor who pushes them to act. The dragons try to kill them, and the heroes barely win. Just like in Marvel movies, forty-five minutes into the second half, right when they’re about to be defeated (Blockbuster is about to buy Netflix, Yahoo is about to buy Google), the heroes rise from the ashes and wipe out Blockbuster, and Yahoo.
“When we look at innovators’ stories, we confuse innovation with certain traits of the innovator. In other words, we stop looking for the innovation and start looking for someone with the traits we associate with innovation.”
Okay, so who are the real innovators?
To answer that question, Kaihan reviewed the 30 most transformative innovations of the last three decades, as evaluated by a panel of Wharton professors.
“I found that if you trace who actually conceived the idea, you realize 70% weren’t entrepreneurs — they were employees,” he concludes. “From the internet, email, DNA sequencing, cell phones, MRI imaging, the stent, all the way to the big breakthroughs in solar energy and wind energy. 70% of cases were created by employees. That means we’re telling a story that doesn’t match reality. The problem is that very few employees feel engaged with their work. People don’t believe their ideas matter.”
Could that be some kind of impostor syndrome among employees? Or is it simply a lack of opportunity, rejected by companies and their slow-moving processes? Well, I’ll leave those questions hanging in the air.
And in case the data feels like ancient history, just look at what’s right in front of us. The paper that kicked off the entire current wave of generative AI, “Attention Is All You Need,” was signed by eight people in 2017, and none of them were founders of anything: they were Google employees. Several of them started their own companies years later, once the technology that now moves billions already existed. In other words, they were intrapreneurs first and entrepreneurs only afterward — even though the story we tell usually starts at the end.
Either way, if these employees give up on their innovations, we as a society won’t get to the next internet, the next cell phone, or the next big technological breakthrough, if we leave it entirely in the hands of “pop entrepreneurs.” In a way, yes, innovative employees resemble entrepreneurs: they’re innovative thinkers, they take on autonomous attitudes, they have a strong sense of the market. They know what’s happening in their space and what the consumer needs. On the other hand, they’re very different. They don’t like risk, they bet little relative to the possibility of winning big, and they use the money the company makes available to them. They also have intrinsic motivation to innovate, because what drives them isn’t the billions of dollars they could earn — because they probably won’t earn that if they’re innovating inside a company. And that’s fine, because these employees just want to make an impact or have fun. Why not?
The problem isn’t having ideas
This is where the uncomfortable question comes in: if people inside companies are already innovating, and have been doing it for decades, why do so many ideas never go anywhere? The answer I keep coming back to is fairly simple: having creative people isn’t the same as having an innovative organization. You can fill a company with people who have great ideas and end up with exactly zero innovation. From what I’ve seen, there are three conditions that usually decide which side of the line you land on.
- The first is permission to experiment. Saying “we want you to innovate” costs nothing and looks great on a slide, but if testing a small hypothesis requires six meetings, three approvals, and a forty-page business case with the ROI of something we don’t even know works yet, then we’re not experimenting — we’re asking for uncertainty to be eliminated before running the experiment that exists precisely to reduce it. And then there’s the most down-to-earth part of all: assembling the team. Almost always, the people you need report to different managers, spread across several departments, and that’s where the idea dies without anyone having fully killed it. As Kaihan puts it, “the company shouldn’t treat employees as employees, but as entrepreneurs.”
- The second is knowing which problems are worth solving. Autonomy doesn’t mean tossing out a “you’re free, go innovate” and walking away, because the next question is: innovate on what? And if people don’t understand the customers or where the organization is heading, you’ll generate a huge number of ideas and very little innovation. Here Kaihan proposes something that strikes me as common sense and that almost nobody does: stop writing complex strategic plans and replace them with purpose statements simple enough for everyone to understand. There’s a harder-to-spot variant of this blocker, which is when the idea actually is good but collides head-on with the current business model; nobody knows how to resolve that conflict, so the idea gets politely shelved and everyone moves on.
- And the third is believing the idea can actually go somewhere. You can run hackathons, contests, workshops, and cover entire walls with Post-its, but if people then watch their ideas disappear, they learn very quickly that proposing ideas doesn’t accomplish much — and the next time, they don’t bother. What’s missing isn’t more creativity, it’s a path: a way to turn an idea into an experiment, and an experiment into evidence, so you can then use that evidence to decide whether to keep going, change direction, or drop it. I’ve been saying the same thing for years — an idea isn’t good or bad until it’s been validated, and dropping an idea because we’ve learned it doesn’t work is also an outcome, and a cheap one at that.
And then we get to the “revolution”… AI
When I first wrote this piece, a person inside a company could have a great idea and still need quite a lot of help to prove it out. They needed developers, designers, data, infrastructure, time, and often budget approved before they could even show anything. The eight people at Google needed Google. Today that math has changed: the same person can research a market, analyze data, write code, build an interface, and have a prototype in front of them within hours or days.
This doesn’t automatically turn anyone into an innovator (I wish it were that easy), and it doesn’t mean engineers, designers, or researchers are now unnecessary, because building a prototype and building a product that holds up in the real world are still two very different things — and that gap is exactly where most projects get lost. But something has changed: the distance between “I have an idea” and “I can show you something that works” has become very short. And that shifts where the bottleneck sits: it’s no longer about who knows how to build things, it’s about who truly understands the problem.
If, back when experimenting cost months and budget, 70% of major innovations were already coming from employees, what’s going to happen now that those same people can test their ideas in an afternoon? I don’t have the answer, but it strikes me as the best question a company can ask itself in 2026.
And why am I telling you this?
The clock keeps moving, but the problem stays the same — we’ve just changed the technology. An MIT survey (NANDA initiative, 2025) on generative AI pilots in companies found that 95% never reached real operational use. When you read the case studies, it’s almost never the model that fails. What fails is that nobody designed how that idea was supposed to move through the organization: who decides, who pays, who maintains it the day after the demo. It’s exactly the same blocker Kaihan describes, just with a different name and a bigger budget.
In the European projects we work on, with consortiums of ten or eleven partners from various countries, you see this in high definition. It shows up in getting eleven different organizations to move like a single product team, and in making sure the plant operator who’s actually going to use the tool is part of the conversation on day one, not the last day.
Well, that’s part of why a lab exists inside a consulting firm. I promise you it’s not to have a garage with a foosball table, but to create what Kaihan would call an island of freedom: a place with limited but protected resources, with the autonomy to experiment without twenty approvals, and with people who have a personal stake in making it work. If 70% of major innovations came from employees, the least we can do is stop making it so hard for them.
So the next time you read the story of the visionary founder, remember that there was probably someone with an employment contract behind the idea. And that someone might be you.
Text inspired by the following books and texts: “Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs” by Kaihan Krippendorff; “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries; “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown; “How to Encourage Innovative Employees”; the MIT NANDA report “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business” (2025); and, as always, from life.
