Corporates and Startups Are Playing Different Games. And Nobody's Winning.

Yi Hoo Ong starts with a simple observation: "Corporates and startups are playing different games."

And then he makes it specific: "Corporates are playing chess. Startups are playing Fortnite."

Chess has rules. Every piece moves in a defined way. There are structures. It's a turn-based game where you can think three moves ahead. Whoever is more strategic and patient usually wins.

Fortnite has a dynamic map. The constraints are constantly closing in. You have to be ready to go offensive or defensive at any moment. There are no established pieces. You're improvising constantly. The game rewards speed and adaptability over planning.

And here's the problem: They're trying to play these two completely different games in the same field while acting like they're playing the same game.

Yi Hoo Ong learned this distinction at Li&Fung, a massive FMCG company where he spent years trying to build bridges between the corporate machine and the startup ecosystem. He's now the chief innovation officer at Human at Work, a strategy and innovation consultancy. And what he's learned is that the gap between corporates and startups isn't about resources or intelligence. It's about operating entirely in different realities.

The Translation Problem

Imagine you're a startup founder with momentum. Your funding just hit the market. You've grown your prototype by 10x. You're crushing it.

And you're talking to a corporate, also growing. But they're growing by 1% instead of 10x.

The corporate looks at you and thinks: "You're small fries. We have established customer relationships. We have distribution. We have scale."

What they're not seeing is that you're willing to not be profitable to own the customer relationship first. You're willing to lose money to grab market share. You're thinking three years ahead about dominance, not next quarter about margins.

These are fundamentally different value propositions. And when a corporate tries to compete by thinking "How do we maintain our margin?" while a startup is thinking "How do we obliterate the market?" the startup wins. Not always. But often.

Yi talks about being in these situations constantly. He's the translator. He's trying to explain to a corporate that they're not playing the same game as the startup they're competing with. And they have to recognize the game has changed.

The problem is: Most corporates can't change their game. Not because they're not smart. But because the entire organization is built for chess. The financial systems are built for chess. The planning cycles are built for chess. The incentive structures are built for chess.

So what you get is: A corporate trying to learn to play Fortnite while still being stuck in chess thinking.

It doesn't end well.

The Technology Trap

Here's where it gets interesting. Yi describes a pattern he sees constantly: Large organizations become convinced they need to solve a problem with technology. Usually the wrong technology.

Customer satisfaction is dropping? We need an AI chatbot.

Sales are slipping? We need a blockchain solution.

Market share declining? We need to get into data science.

And what Yi always does is stop the conversation: "What are you actually trying to solve?"

Because the technology obsession is a symptom of something deeper. It's the corporate version of cargo cult innovation—if we use the right buzzwords and deploy the right tools, we'll get the right results.

But that's not how it works.

He gives a specific example: A retail company is losing customers. Customer satisfaction metrics are dropping. So they think: "We need an AI chatbot."

But Yi asks: Why are customers unhappy? Is it because they're waiting in line for two hours? Is it because they're unable to complete a transaction? Is it because nobody answers the phone?

Maybe it is actually a chatbot problem. Maybe it's not. And if it's not a chatbot problem, spending millions on an AI solution doesn't solve anything. It just makes you feel like you're doing something.

This is the fundamental error in corporate innovation: Starting with the solution and then trying to find the problem. Instead of starting with the problem and then finding the simplest solution.

The Culture-Innovation Feedback Loop

Yi learned something at Lian Fong that shaped how he thinks about everything now: Innovation doesn't come from a lab. It comes from culture.

You cannot build an innovation lab and suddenly become innovative. You cannot run hackathons and suddenly become innovative. You cannot hire innovation professionals and suddenly become innovative.

You can do all those things and still have nothing change. Because culture—the underlying way people think and operate—is what actually determines what happens.

What happens during those hackathons? Do people propose ideas that will actually generate revenue? Or do they propose ideas they think leadership wants to hear?

Do people in the lab feel safe failing? Or are they terrified of proposing anything that might threaten their career?

Yi describes his work at Lian Fong going through the entire organization, visiting offices, meeting people, understanding what was actually happening beneath the official narratives. And what he found was: There are ideas everywhere. In the Philippines office, in the Chinese operations, in the US division. People have ideas. The problem is the ideas never move.

Why? Because the culture doesn't support ideas that came from anyone except the people with the biggest paychecks.

So he created something called The Workshop (branded as "The Kitchen"). It was crowdsourcing for innovation. The idea: Surface all the ideas from across the organization. Make them transparent. Let people collectively improve them.

The radical premise: The best ideas don't come from HQ. The best ideas don't come from the senior people. They come from people who actually have to solve problems day-to-day.

But the system was built to ignore them. So he built something to make those voices visible.

The Workshop Insight

Here's what Yi learned from that experience: Most of what kills great ideas in large organizations isn't the idea itself. It's the cultural assumption that ideas need to come from certain people.

The Philippines team would have a great solution to a problem. But because they were a small team in the Philippines, they assumed they couldn't possibly know better than Hong Kong headquarters.

They were wrong. They often did know better. Because they were living the problem. They weren't solving it from abstraction. They were solving it from reality.

The solution wasn't to force ideas up the hierarchy. It was to make the hierarchy irrelevant. To surface ideas and let them be judged on merit, not on who proposed them.

This is radical for most organizations. Because hierarchy isn't actually about merit. Hierarchy is about control. Control of budget. Control of resources. Control of narrative.

When you surface ideas publicly, when you make them judged on actual impact rather than who proposed them, you've violated the hierarchy.

And most organizations can't handle that.

The Human at Work Approach

Now at Human at Work, Yi works with both corporates and startups. And what he's learned is that the gap isn't closing. It's widening.

Corporates are getting more corporate. More process-driven. More risk-averse. More focused on extracting value from existing businesses.

Startups are getting more entrepreneurial. More risk-taking. More willing to lose money for dominance.

The game gap is growing.

So his job has become: Help both sides understand they're playing different games and figure out how to partner anyway.

For corporates, this means: Stop trying to force startups to play chess. Understand that they have different constraints and different goals. Create structures that let startup thinking exist inside corporate contexts, even though it's uncomfortable.

For startups, this means: Understand why corporates move slow. It's not stupidity. It's complexity. They have thousands of employees. They have legacy systems. They have regulatory constraints. They can't move like you can.

Real partnerships work when both sides accept the game difference instead of trying to deny it.

Why This Matters

You're probably not managing corporate-startup relationships. But the core insight—that different contexts produce fundamentally different operating styles—applies everywhere.

Your startup operates in startup mode: High risk, fast iteration, willingness to lose money for growth.

Your corporate sibling operates in corporate mode: Margin protection, careful planning, resource optimization.

These aren't different amounts of the same thing. They're different things entirely. Trying to make them work the same way is futile.

The organizations that actually win are the ones that recognize this and design their culture accordingly. They understand that innovation teams need different incentives than execution teams. Different metrics. Different expectations.

They don't try to make innovation teams operate like the rest of the company. They create space for a different game to be played.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what Yi won't say directly but is implied: Most corporates say they want innovation. What they actually want is for things to stay the same while appearing to change.

Real innovation requires accepting game-changing disruption. It requires letting people operate differently. It requires questioning assumptions that built the company.

That's terrifying. So most organizations choose to say they value innovation while creating cultures that kill it.

And then they're shocked when the startups win.

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Want the Full Story?

Yi Hoo Ong's background spans Li&Fung, where he worked with ecosystems and innovation programs, and now Human at Work, where he works with both sides of the corporate-startup divide. His insights on why the gap exists and what actually bridges it come from years of trying to translate between two fundamentally different operating systems.

If you want the full conversation—including his specific approach to helping corporates understand startup thinking and how The Workshop actually worked—listen to Yaniv Corem's interview with Yi on The School of Innovation podcast.

Because here's the thing about corporates and startups: They're not enemies. They're not competitors necessarily. They're just playing different games in a world that doesn't have room for both. The ones who understand that and figure out how to compete honestly while respecting the game difference are the ones who might actually make something meaningful happen.

The question is: Which game are you playing?