Many people are familiar with popular TV shows like Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den, where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel of wealthy investors, hoping to secure funding and strategic partnerships. What do these shows have in common? They promote problem-solving, creativity, and risk-taking. These qualities aren’t confined to television or venture capital, but they can also inspire innovation within the corporate world. After all, large companies need a strong innovation engine to develop new products and services.
What powers an innovation engine?
In Creative Construction (2019), Gary Pisano argues that sustained innovation in large companies stems from building an “innovation engine” composed of strategy, systems, and culture. One tool within such a system is opening firm-wide tournaments, which democratise innovation by crowdsourcing ideas. Empowering employees to act as intrapreneurs not only generates new products, services, and markets, but also fosters bottom-up innovation.
At PwC, the Client Innovation Team hosts an annual edition of the Dragons’ Innovation Tournament, an internal opportunity for employees to become intrapreneurs. In a nutshell, all employees can submit their ideas via an internal crowdsourcing platform. Selected teams are then shortlisted to pitch their ideas to a jury, our very own “dragons.” The goal is to convince them of the ideas’ potential for implementation and market success.
Can you see the similarity? Just like the TV shows, we fuel the creation of go-to-market ideas to keep the innovation engine running.
But generating ideas is only half the job: true innovation also requires execution.
From ideas to impact: The innovation funnel
Tournaments like the Dragons are just one touchpoint in the innovation funnel of large companies such as PwC. Rather than producing a single winner, these tournaments can generate a portfolio of innovations. Even the so-called “failed” ideas contribute valuable insights and data. And if an idea isn’t working, it’s better to kill it and move on, you can always revisit it later.
As for the winning ideas, they stand out by aligning more closely with client needs, business priorities, and market momentum. Nonetheless, even the most promising concepts must enter the innovation funnel for further incubation, rather than going straight to market. None of it matters if youdon’t turn ideas into projects and run experiments.In the book The Invincible Company, Alexander Osterwalder says “If you just do idea competitions in your company, it’s like skipping a leg day in the gym. It’s not going to lead to results.”
At PwC, we incentivise this culture of experimentation by providing winning teams from the Dragons’ Innovation Tournament with resources to experiment with their ideas. Think of it as equipment for training the leg, it builds a strong foundation to move forward. These resources come from receiving mentoring, to securing a budget for building Proofs of Concept (POCs) and testing the feasibility and desirability of their solutions.
And when these ideas leave the “training ground” and enter the real world, that’s when the real impact begins.
The success story of EvalTech.AI: From pitch to proof
The latest success story from PwC’s Dragon’s Innovation Tournament involves four participants who came together with a common goal: to bring their idea from paper to reimagine innovation within the public sector.
Under the name EvalTech.AI, their solution is an AI-powered evaluation platform designed to enhance transparency, efficiency, and impact assessment in public sector projects. It was developed in response to persistent challenges such as manual document analysis, the absence of objective evaluation criteria, and limited visibility into project outcomes. By addressing these issues, the platform aims to transform how public institutions assess and communicate the effectiveness of their initiatives.
This and many other ideas could have easily remained on paper, or worse, as fleeting thoughts never explored. Yet each success story stands as living proof of the transformative power of intrapreneurship.
And while it’s often mistaken for entrepreneurship, the distinction matters: intrapreneurship thrives within an existing organisation, harnessing its resources, talent, and networks to spark change from the inside out. In a world that rewards reinvention, this is how even the largest companies remain bold, relevant, and ahead of the curve.
Listen to the ARA City Radio interview with the Dragons’ Innovation Tournament winning team
Authors: Juliana Macedo Maines, Innovation Designer – Client Innovation Team of PwC Luxembourg, and Christian Heinz, Tax Partner and Client Innovation Team Leader of Pwc Luxembourg
