Melvin Streefkerk
Manager
Melvin is a growth-minded innovation manager. For him, innovation is an adventure with a goal, but with risks along the way. His corporate background makes him an effective networker and stakeholder manager, as well as someone who sympathetically challenges the status quo. He knows how to select the right innovation talent, develop a team, and collaborate on the opportunities of today and tomorrow.
Jeroen Kamp
Manager
Jeroen is a creative, data-driven innovation expert and, for the past two years at nlmtd, a specialist in automation and mechanization. In Schiphol’s complex operational environment and infrastructure, he has worked on vision, strategy, roadmaps, and a portfolio of projects for baggage-handling innovations. He effortlessly connects the dots, identifies missing issues, and helps teams quickly achieve their intended results through his pragmatic, goal-oriented approach – with just the right amount of tact in stakeholder management.
Piet-Hein Goossens
Director
Piet-Hein makes a positive impact, from facilitating decision-making in the boardroom to implementing it on the shop floor.
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Why the Smartest Organizations Embrace a Hybrid Innovation Approach
From center to edge
For most of the past decade, large organizations tried to innovate from a central hub. Specialized teams operated separately from the day-to-day business, with new talent, fresh methods, and plenty of room to experiment. This setup generated ideas, but too many of them never reached the core. The transfer was difficult. Prototypes got stranded in the familiar “innovation valley of death,” stumbled over “not-here-invented,” and failed to deliver value at scale.
In response, many organizations shifted innovation to the business units. That made sense. Teams closest to customers see problems earlier, can prototype and design for real constraints faster. Decisions come quicker, and solutions reflect domain realities rather than assumptions from headquarters. In complex hardware-software companies operating in difficult environments, this change has been compelling: regional teams know the safety regimes, environmental stressors, and integration idiosyncrasies that a central lab rarely encounters. When they take the lead, discovery accelerates and relevance improves.
When everything becomes local, wire can break
But an entirely local model introduces a new risk. Similar problems are solved in three different ways. Supplier contracts multiply. Hard-won lessons stay within a region or product line. And when leaders ask how these initiatives result in a small set of strategic deployments, the answers are hesitant.
This is not because people make bad choices. It’s structural. The conditions that enable speed at the edge do not automatically create alignment, reuse, or scale. Without intervention, decentralization fragments. The center loses the ability to turn local insights into business advantage.
This is no small problem. It results in double spending, longer time-to-market, inconsistency in safety and security, and platforms drifting apart. The longer you wait, the more difficult and costly it becomes to tie things back together, while competitors that align and reuse move faster and cheaper.
The question that counts
How do you keep the speed, customer focus, and ownership that make decentralized innovation work, while maintaining the strategic focus, shared platforms, and efficient scaling that make a company work?
A Better Operating System: The Hybrid Innovation Model
The Hybrid Innovation Model combines edge speed with core coherence. It is not a return to command-and-control. It is an operational system that clarifies roles, concentrates scarce expertise, and transforms what works in one place into something that many can use.
At the center sits the Core, an Innovation Office or Center of Excellence. Its job is to provide direction and protect the few standards that enable scaling. The Core names a small number of enterprise themes for the next 12-24 months and publishes practical learning sessions for architecture, data, security, and safety. It concentrates expertise that no single business unit can maintain alone and makes proven edge-speed solutions convert into reusable assets: reference designs, modules, manuals. It also orchestrates the broader ecosystem, so teams don’t reinvent what already exists.
Around the center are the Edges, business units, regions, or product lines. They are responsible for discovery and results. They learn from real customers in real operational conditions, adapt solutions to context, and deliver through to measurable results. Within the Core’s leanings, they choose methods and cadences. Their roadmaps connect to enterprise themes, but execution remains anchored in local realities.
Running alongside both are Shared Services. They provide the rails that make speed safe, remove friction, and reduce risk. Finance moves from annual deployments to phased funding, releasing capital as evidence grows. IT curates secure, pre-approved environments and toolchains so teams can build without weeks of negotiations. Procurement keeps preferred suppliers and terms ready to reduce cycle time. Legal and Compliance services provide templates and velocity assessments for repeating patterns.
This is the discipline behind Innovation Accounting 2.0: make progress visible, codify learning, and scale only what the evidence supports.
How to put the model in motion
Start with the Core. Appoint a small senior team with a service mandate. Name three to five enterprise themes and publish clear learnings. Offer a visible catalog of services, architecture reviews, field test design, security issues, reliability, advanced analysis, and a small bench of deployable specialists. When an Edge proves a solution, Core packages it as a supported module so others can reuse rather than rebuild. Measure success by reuse, cycle time, and proof quality, not control.
Activate the Edges. Start with two or three motivated units. Each writes a one-page charter that links a local opportunity to the enterprise themes and sets clear hypotheses. Conduct short discovery cycles in real conditions and make evidence-based decisions. Use Core leanings and modules by default; allow divergence only if it is time-bound and documented. Share learning in a simple standard format and move from prototype to pilot to production as evidence accumulates.
Involve Shared Services from day one. Replace annual funding with tiered funding. Provide secure, pre-approved environments and tools. Keep preferred vendor frameworks and terms ready. Publish standard clauses and velocity review paths. Agree on simple service levels so that the fast path becomes the standard path.
Adopted together, these roles create a solid rhythm: the center clarifies and strengthens, the edge discovers and delivers, and the rails keep speed sustainable. You retain the agility that makes decentralization attractive and regain the alignment that makes scale possible.
If you would like to learn more about the Hybrid Innovation Model, please get in touch with Melvin Streefkerk, Jeroen Kamp, or Piet-Hein Goossens.
