Rather than relying on formal knowledge sharing, Alphabet's X embeds central teams (like legal, finance, prototyping) that float between projects. These individuals become natural vectors, carrying insights, best practices, and innovative ideas from one project to another, fostering organic knowledge transfer.

If a company creates a siloed "innovation team," it's a sign the main product organization is stuck in "business as usual" maintenance. Innovation should be a mindset embedded across all teams, not an isolated function delegated to a select few.

Oshkosh's CVC team is a hybrid, not siloed in one department. It includes members from corporate development, a venture lead in a tech hub (Bay Area), and a counterpart in an engineering business unit. This structure ensures that strategic goals, technological feasibility, and market deal flow are constantly aligned.

According to Joe Tsai, creating a dedicated "innovation division" in a large company is a flawed strategy. These units fail because the company's core business will always command the best talent and resources, leaving the innovation team isolated and under-resourced. Innovation must be instilled organization-wide.

Ipsen views its R&D strategy as accelerating innovation sourced from academia and biotech. It leverages its strengths in clinical, regulatory, and commercialization to complement the focused discovery work done by smaller partners, acting as a catalyst within the broader life sciences ecosystem rather than just a buyer.

Siphoning off cutting-edge work to a separate 'labs' group demotivates core teams and disconnects innovation from those who own the customer. Instead, foster 'innovating teams' by making innovation the responsibility of the core product teams themselves.

Stripe's Experimental Projects Team discovered that embedding its members directly within existing product and infrastructure teams leads to higher success rates. These "embedded projects" are more likely to reach escape velocity and be successfully adopted by the business, contrasting with the common model of an isolated R&D or innovation lab.

To break silos and drive performance, companies can structure internal functions like marketing or IT as competing agencies. Product teams can 'hire' the internal department of their choice, creating a marketplace that forces support functions to operate with a P&L and be truly customer-centric.

Research across major companies shows that 71% of the time, a solution for a known customer need already exists internally. The primary barrier to innovation isn't a lack of solutions, but the inability for siloed departments to discover and connect existing capabilities with identified customer needs.