For most CEOs and Chief Strategy Officers, the mandate is clear: Find new engines of growth and innovation.

The current S-curve is flattening.

Digital transformation is no longer a differentiator. It’s table stakes. The next wave of value creation rarely comes from optimizing the business you already have with the tools you already have available.

And yet, despite record levels of investment in innovation by large corporations — labs, accelerators, corporate venture arms, internal incubators, and the like — the results continue to disappoint.

According to McKinsey, “84% of executives say innovation is critical to their growth strategy, but only 6% are satisfied with the outcomes.” Similarly, Boston Consulting Group reports that about 70% of corporate innovation initiatives underperform or fail entirely.

It’s not for lack of effort. The problem is structural. And it’s a problem Clay Christensen saw coming. Almost 30 years ago, Clay published his seminal work around disruptive innovation.

And we all still have a lot to learn from his theories.

Clay Christensen's Core Insight: The Structures That Protect Today Kill Tomorrow

We had the privilege of working with Clay in the later years of his life.

Beyond being one of the most generous minds in business, he had an almost prophetic clarity about how corporate innovation actually happens — and why it so often doesn’t.

“The processes and values that make organizations good at the predictable, repeatable work of the core business are the very things that make them bad at disruptive innovation," Clay said.

That is the crux of the Innovator’s Dilemma.

The capabilities that enable a company to scale — efficiency, optimization, customer responsiveness — become liabilities when the market shifts. What Clay saw, and what many still miss, is that innovation isn’t just about strategy. It’s about structure. Inside the core business, innovation is constrained by:

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• Short-term metrics: Measuring ROI too early, before traction or learning has formed
• Customer focus bias: Staying too close to today's most profitable users
• Risk aversion: Punishing failure, especially when it challenges the status quo
• Organizational gravity: Internal policies, processes, and politics that grind down speed

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The result? Innovation theater. Lots of activity. Very little impact.

A New Structure for Disruption: Venture Building

What if, instead of trying to force disruptive ideas into structures built for optimization, you built new structures designed for exploration? That’s the idea behind venture building.

At Alloy Partners, we work with Fortune 500 companies to identify critical problems in their industries — and then we co-create independent, venture-scalable startups to solve them.

These aren’t internal pilots or sandbox experiments. They’re real companies with real teams, go-to-market freedom, and the startup DNA required to move fast. This model works especially well when:

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• The opportunity doesn’t fit within the current org chart
• Internal teams lack incentives or authority to pursue it
• M&A is too late-stage or overpriced
• The problem demands speed the core can’t match‍

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Recently, we partnered with a university, a state, and private healthcare companies to address the rising crisis in opioid overdose. The challenge was real. The need was urgent. But no single researcher or business unit could own it. Together, we launched a new company from scratch: a novel platform for community-based overdose response, now live with patients and scaling across states.

Would Clay Approve?

We like to believe he would.

In fact, we believe he'd see venture building as a natural evolution of the innovation models he helped define.

Clay often said that disruptive innovation requires a different business model, different profit formula, and different capabilities. Venture building offers exactly that. It creates structural separation from the core, while keeping the new effort close to the customer problem and aligned with the company's strategic intent.

To say nothing of the advantages a corporation might imbue into a startup they help bring to life. “If you try to cram a disruptive innovation into the existing business model, it will get killed — every time,” Clay noted.

By building outside the org chart, these new ventures can:

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• Sell to new customers without needing internal sales support
• Pivot and iterate without asking permission
• Build models that would never clear the corporate P&L
• Scale, or even fail, without the massive resources required to grow within a company

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At the same time, the corporate partner brings unmatched advantages — distribution, credibility, market insight — that most startups can only dream of. It’s the best of both worlds: startup speed with enterprise strength.

What Clay Would Warn Us About

But if Clay were still with us, we believe he’d offer two warnings — to us, and to the companies we partner with.

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• First, don’t confuse proximity with understanding. Spending time inside a corporation doesn’t automatically reveal the right problems to solve. You have to go deeper. You have to understand the jobs customers are hiring products to do. You have to understand why past attempts failed.

• Second, be ruthless about incentives. If the new venture is culturally, financially, or politically tied to the core business, it will bend toward the old way of thinking. True innovation requires not just new ideas — but new systems of belief and behavior.

Designing Around Gravity

Clay used to say, “You may hate gravity, but gravity doesn’t care.” Innovation has its own gravity: It will always be pulled back into the dominant logic of the core business, unless you design around it.

That’s what Alloy Partners was built to do.

We’re not here to fix the core. We’re here to help companies build what comes next. Not through decks or strategy sessions, but through real startups solving real problems with real results.

If that sounds like something you want to explore, we’d love to talk.