There’s a question I kept returning to early in my leadership career: what happens to all the good ideas that never get voiced? The ones that employees carry around for months, half-formed, waiting for the right moment that never quite arrives?
The answer, in most organisations, is nothing. They evaporate. Not because the ideas weren’t worth pursuing, but because there was no structured pathway between “I have an idea” and “here’s what we could build.”
Startup School was my attempt to build that pathway.
What It Was
I launched and led an annual Startup School — a programme combining a full startup curriculum with a live venture challenge. Each cohort brought together over 1,000 participants from across the organisation, giving them something genuinely unusual: curated lectures, practical exercises, direct access to startup founders, exposure to leadership, and one-on-one mentorship from practitioners who had actually built things.
It wasn’t a workshop. It wasn’t a hackathon. It was a structured learning journey that ended with participants pitching real business cases — with the genuine possibility of getting funded.
Why the Format Mattered
The curriculum design was deliberate. Most corporate innovation programmes teach frameworks. Startup School taught behaviour — specifically, the behaviour of testing assumptions, building fast, and thinking about who you’re building for before you decide what to build. The founders who came in to share their experiences weren’t there as inspiration speakers. They were there to make the messiness of building visible, because that’s what actually equips people to try.
The venture challenge at the end was the forcing function. When participants knew their idea would be pitched to leadership with real funding on the table, the quality of the thinking throughout the programme changed noticeably. Stakes, even modest ones, concentrate the mind.
What It Proved
Over the years, Startup School became one of the most consistent ways I observed talent revealing itself. Some of the participants who came in as contributors left as initiative leaders. Some of the ideas pitched became actual internal startups. And almost universally, the participants came out thinking differently about problems — which, ultimately, was the point.
Building a culture of innovation isn’t a declaration. It’s a repeated investment in the conditions that allow innovative behaviour to emerge naturally. Startup School was one of those investments.
In your organisation, where does an employee with a genuine idea actually go — and does that pathway work?
Let’s keep learning — together.
harish.balasubramanian 
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