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’ve launched the Leaders in Innovation Series. These monthly conversations from Greentown Labs feature executives from some of the world’s leading companies, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how innovation is designed and sustained.
The goal? To uncover what really works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to turning ideas into impact.
Before joining GE Vernova, Pablo Koziner had already built a uniquely varied career across the energy and industrial landscape. He’s moved through corporate law, Caterpillar’s global machinery and energy businesses, the challenges of Nikola, and now into one of the most complex reinvention efforts in the energy sector. The common thread is that he keeps choosing dynamic and evolving environments—places where the day-to-day work focuses more on building what doesn’t exist rather than maintaining what already does.
That makes his arrival as GE Vernova’s Chief Commercial & Operations Officer feel almost inevitable. The company was spun out of GE with a mandate to behave like one organization and act with the agility of a startup, despite being assembled from legacy units. Koziner stepped into that challenge with a wisdom and practicality honed from years of navigating methodical incumbents and chaotic startups alike. It’s this mix—the operator’s realism and the innovator’s appetite—that animates the ideas we ended up exploring together.
1. Corporates should make organizational plasticity their operating condition
If you wanted a case study in organizational plasticity, GE Vernova would be a prime example. On April 2, 2024, GE spun off a set of energy businesses into its own publicly traded company. Its bet was that a more plastic, independent organization could turn a 130‑year industrial base and billions in committed R&D into new growth engines for electrification and decarbonization, not just incremental upgrades.
From Koziner’s vantage point, this is where the “startup” ethos begins. He talked me through the challenging work of stitching together businesses that previously operated semi-independently under a conglomerate umbrella. The spin-off comes with a strong balance sheet and a respected brand, sure, but it also carries the weight of legacy cultures, differing incentives, and brand-new teams that have never really “played T-ball together,” as he puts it. In that sense, GE Vernova is behaving like an “ambidextrous” organization,” exploiting a huge installed base while exploring new business models and offerings across AI-enabled grid software, advanced generation, and emerging climatetech.
This is plasticity in a very fundamental sense, taking a century-old industrial lineage and asking it to behave with the adaptability of a startup. Among other things, it means unifying fragmented business units under a single leadership model, rewiring norms around risk and collaboration, and reframing previously siloed capabilities into integrated solutions customers can actually recognize as value.
What I appreciate is that Koziner doesn’t romanticize any of this. Growth, he kept reminding me, is “the hardest thing” you do as an executive. Harder, in some ways, than cutting costs or running the core. Organizational plasticity may sound slick, but in practice it can be a slow, tedious grind of norm-setting, clarifying “what’s acceptable” from a risk standpoint, and building shared identity. Still, it’s exactly what is necessary for corporates to pursue if they want to have a competitive edge in today’s innovation landscape.
2. Follow the customer’s reality, not the shiny tech
When I pushed Koziner on where innovation actually happens inside a company like GE Vernova, he emphasized not the tech or lab breakthroughs but the customer’s value equation, defined by three things: capacity, value, and decarbonization. I.e., can you give me the energy I need, at a price my P&L can bear, with a carbon profile that either meets my requirements today or credibly gets me there tomorrow?
Of course, the tech still very much matters. GE Vernova’s own R&D engine is enormous. The company has committed roughly $9B in R&D and capex through 2028, anchored by an advanced research center with around 200 Ph.D. scientists working on hydrogen, carbon capture, robotics, AI, and other enabling technologies, alongside business-embedded R&D inside each unit.
Koziner, however, keeps returning to the crucial point that success hinges on the discipline of mapping where your capabilities actually intersect with your customer’s reality, rather than just assuming that technical possibility equals market demand.
This take is refreshing in many ways, chiefly in that it sidesteps the corporate habit of treating technology as destiny. Instead, Koziner is saying that value emerges where customer economics and technological capability meet, and only then. Ultimately, some “great ideas” are simply premature until the conditions around them shift.
3. Bet small and often—and be willing to walk away fast
Koziner thinks very differently about risk compared to the standard corporate script. He’s much less interested in grand “moonshot” declarations than he is in a more operational (and, frankly, more human) approach: many small, bounded bets, each designed to generate learning before scale. Research seems to support this idea, suggesting that the companies that outperform in volatile environments are the ones that practice “strategic optionality,” i.e., small, low-cost, time-boxed experiments that create an asymmetric upside. Put another way, innovation is not “do lots of experiments,” but “do lots of bounded experiments with clear learning goals, then be ruthless about stopping.”
It appears to me that what Koziner is doing, whether he frames it this way or not, is treating innovation as a systems problem rather than an ideative one. Once you see it through that lens, you understand why GE Vernova’s bets have to be sequenced and deeply attuned to surrounding conditions. What must be true for an idea to work? What’s the actual customer problem? How much research supports this? And crucially: at what point will we stop? These are all questions corporates must ask themselves as part of their decision-making cadence. Of course, the key is not to turn optionality into an excuse for never committing. Run disciplined pilots, yes, but then double down when the learning actually warrants it.
4. The next big idea starts with what the system can actually support
This brings me to a related point that surfaced during our conversation, which is that breakthrough innovation is less likely to emerge from blue-sky leaps than it is from expanding the “adjacent possible”—the next set of solutions that become viable only when existing capabilities, market conditions, and institutional forces snap into a new configuration.
Koziner’s innovation equation (capacity × value × decarbonization) is essentially a scanning tool for this, a way of reading where the energy system is actually capable of moving next, not in theory but in practice. It grounds him in what to continually solve for when thinking about energy—while remembering that at the same time, a customer’s value equation may be different. Hydrogen trucking, for instance, doesn’t enter the adjacent possible until regulation, infrastructure, and freight economics all shift at once. Carbon capture only becomes real when policy and capital converge. And digital, AI-enabled optimization is already widening the adjacent possible for grid stability and energy efficiency in ways that weren’t feasible even a few years ago.
What this really highlights is Koziner’s pragmatism. Innovation moves when the system moves. There’s risk and uncertainty in trying to forecast the future, but corporates still need to be agile. GE Vernova’s job, and that of any corporate wishing to remain competitive, is to stay observant enough of those shifting conditions to act at the moment something becomes viable.
5. Culture is the tipping point where innovation either accelerates or dies
Culture sits at the center of Koziner’s story. Without a unified company culture, he argues, innovation is hardly possible. This echoes what organizational researchers have found, that company cultures that reward openness and knowledge-sharing are far better at generating and applying new ideas than those that default to hierarchy and control.
GE Vernova’s guiding cultural philosophy, the “GE Vernova Way,” is structured around five clear principles: driving innovation, serving customers, working leanly, winning as a team, and prioritizing accountability.
“Our future depends on us being curious and listening and knowing how to give people opportunities and take some risks.”
Pablo Koziner
Geography and external partnerships are also part of this strategy. Relocating the company’s center of gravity to Cambridge has allowed GE Vernova to plug into Boston’s talent and academic ecosystem, and build porous interfaces with partners, from Greentown to MIT to national labs, that continuously expand GE Vernova’s “adjacent possible” in the energy system.
And though it sounds like a platitude, the most critical element of culture is trust. In our discussion, Koziner kept coming back to trust as the only way to counter what he called the “gravity” of legacy structures. A stitched-together organization doesn’t magically become innovative because you rebrand it or create cross-functional teams. You need to foster enough trust that people start to believe that experimentation won’t be punished, that collaboration won’t slow them down, and that risk-taking is something leaders actually mean.
Realistically, this kind of cultural transition demands a kind of elasticity that most legacy organizations never get to develop. Whether GE Vernova can reach a point where the trust density, communication flow, and shared behavioral norms start reinforcing each other rather than colliding hinges on Koziner’s mission to prioritize building a strong shared identity just as much as he prioritizes R&D.
Looking forward: reinvention will decide who survives the transition
Talking with Koziner made me realize how much of the decarbonization story sits far upstream of the technologies we like to obsess over. Many incumbents forget that half of the work is organizational and operational rather than technological: uniting together teams into one cultural singularity; running many small, measured bets with learning as the chief ROI; and tuning innovation to the customer’s reality rather than whatever breakthroughs happen in the lab.
The shared challenge that any incumbent faces is whether the organizational plasticity they aspire to can hold once the novelty of the spin-out wears off, behaviors begin to calcify, and quarterly pressures mount. It’s one thing to describe yourself as a startup inside a legacy giant and another altogether to actually protect the experimentation and delayed payoffs that plasticity requires, especially in capital‑intensive, highly regulated markets. If GE Vernova can keep that plasticity, it will emerge on the other side of its rebirth and become a live case study in how legacy firms can turn culture into an innovation engine.
Aisling Carlson is the Chief Growth Officer at Greentown Labs. Learn more about Greentown here and about partnership opportunities here.
This article was originally published on Aisling’s LinkedIn.
The post Meet the Corporate That’s Operating as a Startup appeared first on Greentown Labs.
