During the last few decades in Latin America, companies thought of technology as an asset to be developed "in-house." There was no ecosystem of applications .
Today, this way of thinking is one of the main reasons why large organizations lose speed, competitiveness, and relevance. Continuing to rely solely on internal solutions is not a sign of strength, but of being behind the times.
Companies that embrace external solutions are up to 2.5 times more likely to succeed than those focused on internal R&D ( BCG Innovation Survey ).
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics will recognize economists who have mathematically demonstrated that countries should embrace disruptive innovations like the one we are experiencing now with generative AI.
An OECD study ( Digital Economy Outlook ) concluded that innovation accounted for more than 50% of productivity growth in the last decade in developed economies. Societies thrive when they absorb disruptive innovation, even when it alters work dynamics and structures in the short term. Creative destruction is uncomfortable, but beneficial.
And although 96% of executives say that innovation will be the main source of growth, only about 20% consider their organizations truly effective at innovating, according to a McKinsey study ( State of Organizations ). This gap reveals an execution problem. Many companies still confuse innovation with control and insist on doing on their own what the market already solves better.
Within large companies, boards and CEOs understand the need for innovation. The problem lies in operational execution. Second-level executives operate under self-serving incentives: newly approved projects, defended budgets, assembled teams, and reputations at stake, ego and insecurity. Internal protection trumps external efficiency.
Furthermore, internal innovation in large organizations is structurally slow. Projects that depend on multiple approval levels have up to 30% more risk of delay and budget overrun compared to autonomous and agile teams, according to a PMI study ( Pulse of the Profession ). Each approval level adds friction. The result is that little real innovation reaches the market.
It is in this window of inefficiency that technology and AI startups enter. Single focus. Clear mission. Top talent is sexier . Data at scale. High interaction cadence and productization.
Scale changes everything. Organizations that handle large volumes of digital interactions can accelerate machine learning and product improvement. A study by MIT Sloan concluded that large-scale data environments can increase the predictive performance of AI models by at least 25%.
A large company that processes thousands of customer data points learns slowly. A startup that processes millions of data points from multiple customers learns quickly and delivers higher performance.
Without scale and with teams divided among multiple priorities, internal products evolve slowly, if at all.
The paradox is clear: competitive advantage today doesn't come from owning everything, but from combining well what already exists in the market.
Companies that have the ability to connect external technology applications to their systems to solve business problems report up to three times higher return on investment in innovation than organizations that innovate in isolation, according to a study by Deloitte Insights.
History reinforces this thesis. The average lifespan of companies in the S&P 500 has fallen drastically in recent decades—today it is about half of what it was 50 years ago—reflecting technological acceleration and the replacement by more adaptable organizations ( Innosight Corporate Longevity Forecast ).
In an environment of accelerated innovation, continuing to do everything alone is not prudence. It's stubbornness.
Thomaz Srougi is the founder and chairman of dr.consulta and the founder and CEO of Carecode. He holds an MBA and a master's degree in Public Policy from the University of Chicago and is a Kauffman Fellow.
