Innovation Is Not Reserved for Startups or Large Corporations

When we talk about innovation, two images almost automatically come to mind. On one side, the startup: young, agile, built around an idea that disrupts an established market. On the other, the large corporation: powerful, structured, capable of dedicating entire teams to imagining tomorrow’s products. These two figures share something in common — they are instantly recognizable. And that is precisely what makes the question interesting.

Because between the two lies an entire world. A dense, diverse world that actually represents the core of the economic landscape. And this world innovates — every day, discreetly, often without even labeling it as such. So where does the idea come from that it is excluded?

The Startup: A Company Built Around Its Innovation

A startup has a particular relationship with innovation: it does not merely practice it — it originates from it. At the beginning, there is always an idea that breaks with something — a new way of approaching a known problem, a technology applied where no one had attempted it before, a market angle previously considered closed.

Around this core, everything gathers. Like mussels clinging to a rock, every recruit, every partner, every euro raised attaches itself to that original idea and strengthens it. The company grows, but its foundation remains the same: it is the product of its initial innovation. Its survival directly depends on it, and everyone on board knows it.

This is not one strategy among others — it is the condition of existence.

The Large Corporation: Turning Innovation into a Permanent Discipline

At the other end of the spectrum, large companies have built a different relationship with innovation. Not a founding spark, but an infrastructure. Their critical size allows them to dedicate significant resources — R&D teams, forward-looking labs, sometimes hundreds of people — whose exclusive mission is to work on what does not yet exist.

This is institutionalized innovation: regular, visible, structured. Patents, academic partnerships, startup acquisitions, product announcements — these companies have the means to generate visibility around what they build. That visibility naturally reinforces the perception that innovation is their territory.

And In Between?

Between these two figures lies a vast and often discreet economic fabric. SMEs, mid-sized companies, family businesses that have spanned generations, service firms deeply rooted in their territories. Companies that were not founded on a disruptive idea — their foundations rest on a craft, expertise, or a local market — and that do not have the means to maintain a dedicated innovation department.

Yet factually, this ecosystem innovates. The production manager who reorganizes a workstation to improve efficiency. The sales representative whose tailored solution for a demanding client becomes, a year later, a standard catalog offering. The CEO returning from a trade fair with a technology they are the first in their sector to test. These things happen constantly, in thousands of companies, without the word “innovation” ever being spoken.

The real question, then, is not whether these companies innovate. They do. The question lies elsewhere.

Granting Permission to Innovate Is Something Else

What may be rarer in this intermediate fabric is the idea that one could — and should — build a structure to innovate intentionally and consistently.

Not because people lack ideas or motivation. But because the framework in which they operate resembles neither that of a startup nor that of a large corporation, and neither do the available reference points.

The startup innovates because it has no choice — it is structural. The large corporation innovates because it has the means — that is structural as well. But an SME that has built its activity around a well-established product or service, with teams fully absorbed in daily operations, how does it justify allocating time, energy, and resources to explore what does not yet exist?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a real leadership issue.

Opening the Conversation

There is probably no universal model — and it would be suspicious if there were one. But a few questions deserve attention.

First: what would an innovation approach look like in your company if it did not attempt to imitate startups or large corporations, but instead started from your own reality, pace, and constraints?

Second: is the quiet innovation already happening within your teams identified, capitalized on, and shared? Or does it remain in the minds of a few individuals, never taking collective form?

Third — perhaps the most uncomfortable: does the structure you have built leave room for projects whose return is not guaranteed within six months? And if not — is that a deliberate choice, or simply something that was never truly decided?

This is not an invitation to disrupt everything, nor a promise that structured innovation automatically produces results. It is an invitation to honestly examine what is already happening — and to decide what to do with it.

Continuing the Reflection

What ultimately distinguishes startups and large corporations in their relationship with innovation is less a matter of size or resources than a matter of permission. Some were compelled from the outset. Others chose to equip themselves accordingly.

The intermediate economic fabric often carries innovation in its veins without ever truly naming or organizing it. Asking why — and what could be done with it — may be one of the most concrete and least frequently addressed questions awaiting SME and mid-sized company leaders.

And where do you stand in relation to this?