From Pilots to Performance: Managing Innovation for Value in Complex Systems
Written by Benedetta Asher
Entrepreneurial Leadership Across Systems
As part of the Social Ventures Residential at King’s Entrepreneurship Lab (E-Lab), I chaired a fireside conversation with Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, FSI, Honourable Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The discussion centred on entrepreneurial leadership across systems and the challenge of translating ambition into real-world impact.
The conversation explored how leaders operate across institutions, mobilise partnerships, and sustain momentum in environments where outcomes are measured over years rather than quarters. Drawing on experience spanning government, international engagement, and cross-sector collaboration, it highlighted how leadership increasingly requires the ability to work across boundaries and design for delivery at scale. While rooted in social ambition, the themes raised extend well beyond any single sector or geography.
What emerged early in the discussion was that leadership at scale is no longer defined solely by vision or authority. It demands the ability to navigate complexity, align multiple actors, across government institutions, public sector agencies, private sector organisations, financial institutions, regulators, entrepreneurs, innovators, civil society organisations, academic institutions, delivery partners, frontline practitioners, and the communities impacted by the systems being designed, and embed initiatives within systems capable of sustaining them. This framing resonated strongly with patterns I have encountered while leading complex strategic programme management and implementation across Health Services, Banking and Finance, and Education, where the challenge is rarely a lack of intent, but execution across complex systems, and where value is often lost during implementation rather than realised through scale.
Innovation Is Rarely the Problem
Across the sectors I have worked in, organisations are rarely constrained by a lack of ideas. Pilots and improvement initiatives are regularly launched to address customer needs, efficiency targets, regulatory requirements, competitive positioning, or social outcomes. As the fireside conversation highlighted, ambition is often supported by partnerships and political will. Yet without the right structures, ambition alone does not translate into impact.
The challenge lies in how innovation is managed once ideas move beyond conception. The transition from pilot to implementation is often where organisational confidence and trust are tested, not because ideas lack merit, but because ownership shifts, integration decisions must be made, and assurance around delivery becomes critical. This tension surfaced repeatedly during the fireside conversation, particularly around how initiatives are embedded within the systems expected to sustain them. When this transition is not handled deliberately, innovation remains active but fragile, generating activity without the conditions required to deliver value at scale.
Systemic Constraints
A consistent line of questioning emerged during the Q&A: what problem are we trying to solve, how can it be addressed efficiently, and how will success be measured in terms of outcomes and impact? These are also the questions I would typically pose when engaging in strategic change conversations. They signal a shift away from activity-driven delivery towards value-driven execution, where clarity of purpose, measurable results, and sustained impact matter as much as intent.
When these questions are applied rigorously, it becomes apparent that many organisations struggle not at the level of ambition, but at the level of structure. The cost of siloed and de-integrated ways of working is that innovation frequently emerges within departmental or functional boundaries, shaped by local priorities and constraints. While this can generate early momentum, it often produces solutions that address symptoms rather than underlying systemic challenges.
As organisations mature, the limitations of this approach become more pronounced. In smaller or less complex environments, siloed innovation may be manageable. In larger, more regulated, or more interconnected systems, however, it becomes a material barrier to impact. Parallel solutions begin to emerge, data is generated but not shared, and decision-making fragments across the organisation. Increasing effort is spent on coordination rather than on delivering outcomes.
In practice, this leads to multiple pilots addressing overlapping challenges, disconnected data, and limited pathways to scale. During the fireside discussion, the emphasis on working across institutions and partnerships underscored this risk clearly. Without deliberate integration, even well-intentioned initiatives struggle to move beyond their initial context, and progress achieved locally fails to translate into system-wide improvement.
Over time, these patterns compound. Learning is not carried forward, confidence in innovation diminishes, and stakeholders become fatigued by repeated initiatives that do not endure. Value is lost not because ideas are weak, but because organisations lack the mechanisms to connect, embed, and sustain them. At this stage of organisational maturity, siloed working is no longer a neutral choice; it actively undermines the ability to deliver strategic outcomes.
Addressing this requires a shift in how innovation is framed and governed. Problems must be defined systemically, ownership shared across boundaries, and success measured in terms of integrated outcomes rather than isolated outputs. This was a consistent undercurrent of the fireside conversation and a recurring lesson from practice: impact at scale depends less on generating new initiatives and more on designing organisations capable of carrying them forward.
The Role of Leadership, Stakeholder Buy-In, and Carrying People Along
Addressing systemic constraints requires more than structural change; it requires leadership that understands how people experience change within complex organisations. During the fireside conversation, leadership emerged not as a question of authority, but of responsibility, particularly the responsibility to align diverse stakeholders around a shared purpose and sustain confidence as initiatives move from ambition to delivery.
In environments that span multiple systems and actors, leadership plays a critical role in creating coherence. This involves articulating why change is necessary, how it will be delivered, and what success looks like over time. Without this clarity, initiatives struggle to gain traction. Stakeholders may support the ambition, but hesitate at the point of implementation if ownership, priorities, and expectations are not aligned.
Stakeholders buy-in is built through involvement and trust rather than communication alone. As initiatives transition from pilot to implementation, leaders must recognise how change is experienced differently across levels of the organisation and create space for engagement and feedback. The fireside discussion reinforced that carrying people along is not a one-off activity, but an ongoing leadership practice essential to sustaining momentum.
When leadership invests in shared understanding and collective ownership, innovation becomes more resilient. People are more willing to navigate uncertainty when they trust the direction of travel and their role within it. As the conversation highlighted, sustained impact depends not only on what organisations choose to do, but on how effectively leaders bring people with them as systems evolve.
Closing Reflection
Chairing the fireside conversation at King’s Entrepreneurship Lab reinforced a clear insight: impact at scale depends less on ambition and more on the systems and leadership required to carry it forward. Across complex organisations, value is realised when ideas are embedded, ownership is shared, and people are brought along through change.
Looking ahead, the opportunity lies in moving beyond isolated pilots towards integrated ways of working that align leadership, stakeholders, and delivery. Organisations that invest in these capabilities are better positioned to translate intent into sustained outcomes and ensure that innovation delivers value over time.
Benedetta Aisosa Asher supports organisations delivering large-scale modernisation and strategy execution across regulated and emerging markets. She works with senior leaders on long-term system transformation, with a particular focus on strengthening institutional and infrastructure capability at scale. Her experience spans financial services, healthcare, education, and, more recently, energy. This includes global enterprise-wide modernisation at HSBC and national system programmes within the NHS. She also mentors early-stage founders through Cambridge University venture programmes, supporting companies scaling across African markets. Benedetta holds an Executive MBA from Cambridge Judge Business School and is based in London.