Innovation doesn’t happen by accident—it’s built. How corporations structure, staff, fund, and measure innovation determines whether bold ideas thrive or get stuck in corporate inertia.
Yet the mechanics behind innovation are often a black box. There’s no one-size-fits-all model, and few companies share how they actually make innovation work—or why it sometimes fails.
That’s why I have launched the Leaders in Innovation Series. These monthly conversations will feature executives from some of the world’s leading companies, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how innovation is truly designed and sustained.
The goal? To uncover what really works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to turning ideas into impact.
Building the Future Means Betting on It
Daniel Moczydlower is helping reshape what innovation looks like inside a legacy corporation. When we spoke this spring, our conversation centered not on new technologies, but the deeper architecture of innovation—a glossy term that often obscures the mercurial matrix of research, market dynamics, and corporate politics that can move ideas forward just as quickly as it kills them. An engineer by training who now speaks just as fluently about organizational psychology as he does propulsion systems, Moczydlower argues that the real work of innovation isn’t discovery, but integration. Breakthroughs only matter if people are willing to adopt them, invest in them, and bring them to scale.
This belief is at the core of Embraer-X, the “startup” Moczydlower is president and CEO of and which sits within Embraer, the third-largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. Created to pursue long-horizon bets and new market opportunities, Embraer-X reflects something that became clear throughout our conversation: innovation, when done right, isn’t disruption for its own sake. It’s a survival strategy—one that demands just as much organizational courage as it does technical prowess.
1. Innovation is a human endeavor, not just a technical one
Technical expertise is often seen as a prerequisite for innovation leadership, but that’s not always the case. While R&D demands deep specialization, innovation stretches far beyond the lab. It’s a cross-functional, often ambiguous effort that demands a different kind of fluency: strategic, emotional, organizational. (I explored this in greater depth in my conversation with Anne Hardy, CIO of Saint-Gobain—read that piece here.)
When I ask Moczydlower what he sees as the most salient qualification for innovation leaders, he doesn’t hesitate to reflect on how his thinking has evolved. With a background in chemical engineering, Moczydlower spent the early part of his career in Brazil’s booming energy sector, eventually becoming CEO of a startup acquired by the German multinational Siemens Energy. At the time, he was convinced that technical fluency was non-negotiable. But over time (and especially after joining Embraer), his views have changed.
“In a broad sense, innovation is about enacting change, but human beings are naturally very resistant to change, so innovation depends just as much on emotional intelligence and storytelling as it does on scientific precision.”
This idea came up often in our conversation: innovation doesn’t usually fail because the technology isn’t ready—it fails because the people aren’t. It’s not enough to build something new. You have to make it resonate, often with skeptical stakeholders in risk-averse industries or customers wary of changing established behaviors. For Moczydlower, the most effective innovation leaders are those who can bridge that divide by balancing hard and soft skills (or building teams that can).
2. Big companies can’t afford not to innovate
Innovation is often described as going hand-in-hand with growth, but the reality, of course, is more complex. Between 2010 and 2019, a quarter of companies didn’t grow at all, and only one in eight achieved sustained double-digit revenue gains. Growth is hard—and innovation, by nature, is risky.
In uncertain times, that risk often leads corporations to pull back. Budgets are cut, focus shifts to protecting the core, and long-term bets are deferred. The irony, however, is that volatility is no longer the exception but the norm. In this environment, innovation isn’t a luxury but one of the only surefire ways to future-proof your survival amidst unpredictable disruption. In fact, one report suggests that economic outperformers innovated twice as fast as low performers in 2020-2021.
But how a company innovates has everything to do with the realities of its size, structure, and tolerance for risk. Moczydlower explains that for a corporation like Embraer, which operates in a highly regulated, capital-intensive industry, embracing long-term innovation means thinking beyond the binary of “protect the core” versus “bet on the edge.” According to him, it’s about building the capacity to do both, and knowing which tools, teams, and timelines belong to which.
3. Horizon 3 is a career risk and a strategic necessity
It’s easy to romanticize breakthrough innovation from the outside, but inside large organizations, pursuing Horizon 3 ideas (long-term, high-risk bets) can be a reputational gamble. Unlike startup founders, corporate innovators rarely get celebrated for swinging big. When an ambitious project fails, the reward is more often a career setback than a second chance. As Moczydlower points out, the stakes for executives are fundamentally different: “In a startup, failure is part of the journey. In a corporation, it can end the journey.”
This, I think, is both a cultural and a structural problem. Without the right incentives and buffers from short-term performance pressures, transformational ideas rarely make it past the early stages. What’s notable about Embraer-X is that it was set up by Embraer’s board with the explicit mandate to explore Horizon 3 innovation, insulated from the demands placed on the core business. When I discuss this with Moczydlower, he credits this “affordable loss” framing as key: by acknowledging upfront that these bets may not pay off (and building that into the model), the organization makes room for long-term thinking.
4. Small is agile, but scale has power
Startups often have the upper hand when it comes to speed, risk tolerance, and proximity to the customer. Their size allows them to move fast, pivot quickly, and pursue bold ideas without legacy baggage. But what they lack—distribution, infrastructure, regulatory expertise, staying power—are precisely the assets large corporations bring to the table. The goal isn’t to emulate startups or protect incumbents, but to design channels that allow both to do what they do best.
At Embraer-X, this means actively engaging with the startup ecosystem while maintaining tight alignment with the core business. In our conversation, Moczydlower emphasized the importance of building intentional pipelines: processes that help identify promising early-stage ideas, test them within the constraints of a highly regulated industry like aerospace, and, if viable, scale them through Embraer’s broader platform. One of the biggest risks for capital-intensive sectors is falling into the so-called “small-size trap,” where early innovations get stuck in pilot purgatory because there’s no clear pathway to commercialization at scale. Avoiding that requires not just partnerships, but also integration mechanisms that help facilitate agility into impact.
5. Innovation only matters if it moves the world
For all the excitement around disruption, Moczydlower is blunt: innovation isn’t a vanity metric.
“A breakthrough that doesn’t reach the real world isn’t innovation—it’s just a good idea that went nowhere.”
The only innovation that counts is the kind that creates tangible value: something people can see, feel, adopt, and build on. Especially in industries like aviation and climatetech, where stakes are high and cycles are long, outcomes matter more than optics.
Of course, that’s a harder proposition in today’s environment. Geopolitical instability, funding pullbacks, and growing institutional risk aversion have made long-term innovation feel less urgent, or at least harder to justify. But both Moczydlower and I agree that this is exactly when future-focused thinking is most critical. After all, Embraer-X was built to pursue Horizon 3 opportunities not in spite of the risk, but because of it. At the time of its formation, the aviation market was in a downturn and Embraer’s board sought to discover opportunities in adjacent markets (like defense and aerospace) to generate counter-cyclical revenue streams. The takeaway, then, is that staying future-focused doesn’t mean ignoring constraints, but rather designing models—like Embraer-X’s “affordable loss” framework—that account for them while still keeping innovation alive. Without this model, companies risk mistaking caution for strategy and stalling just when momentum is most needed.
Looking forward: the real risk isn’t innovation, but inertia
Innovation may be a strategic imperative, but it’s also a bet on timing, on teams, on the willingness of large systems to absorb change. As Embraer-X shows, the real challenge isn’t dreaming up what’s next; it’s building the conditions where “next” can survive. The question going forward is less about whether companies can innovate and more about whether they’re willing to shoulder the structural, cultural, and political costs of doing so. What does it take to protect long-term thinking in a short-term world? Who gets to take risks, and who absorbs the consequences when they don’t pay off? These are the questions that will define not just the future of corporate innovation, but who’s still around to shape it.
Aisling Carlson is the Senior Vice President of Partnerships and Investor Programs at Greentown Labs. Learn more about Greentown here and about partnership opportunities here.
This article was originally published on Aisling’s LinkedIn.
The post Integration, ‘Affordable Loss,’ and Emotional Intelligence: What Makes Corporate Innovation Take Flight appeared first on Greentown Labs.
