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The Innovation Edge

How Large Companies Lose It and How to Get It Back

Merle Symes

Forbes Books, 2025

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After decades of partnering with executive roles at major corporations and leaders of entrepreneurial endeavors, consultant Merle Symes knows what it takes for companies to remain innovative. To create an environment that nurtures constant breakthroughs, senior leaders — and leaders at all levels — must shape their entire organizations’ mindset, culture, processes, and skills. In this helpful guide, Symes draws on real-world examples and firsthand experiences to provide worthy insights into the barriers that keep corporations from innovating and what it takes to reverse this stagnation.

Summary

Strategic innovation enables competition in a rapidly changing environment.

In the past, large corporations depended on raw resources, extensive distribution networks, and financial clout to dominate industries. New inventions took decades to catch on, and companies relied on slow, steady growth. Today, companies must compete with businesses worldwide that use the internet to reach customers directly and efficiently. In 2020, for example, Reinvention Academy researchers found that a majority of companies believed they must reinvent themselves every three years or less to stay in business. Only 12% of companies that made the Fortune 500 in the mid-1950s remain on that list.

When organizations simply add new features to existing products — and attempt to stay ahead of competitors that offer similar products — they fail to see threats from innovations that can upend their entire business models. Kodak, for example, excelled as a camera company until digital photography undercut the use of film. To grow and compete, continually create new value through radical innovation.

Recognize how your company discourages innovation.

Large companies begin as small, innovative...

About the Author

Merle Symes is CEO of The Provenance Group, advising business leaders on strategic innovation and risk management.

The Innovation Edge

How Large Companies Lose It and How to Get It Back

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Summary

Strategic innovation enables competition in a rapidly changing environment.

Recognize how your company discourages innovation.

About the Author

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