If you ask Tina Mathas who should lead transformative innovation projects, she’ll tell you it’s all about the pirates. “It requires a different type of mindset, a different type of ecosystem and environment, and it should be protected,” says Mathas, co-founder of Flow Factory, a company that aims to enhance human performance by integrating the concept of “flow state” with artificial intelligence. For transformative innovation, she argues, big companies need pirates — not quite drunken Jack Sparrow adventurers, but individuals who challenge traditional processes and navigate uncharted waters of creativity and risk.
Mathas’s declaration set the tone for a lively virtual panel on corporate innovation at Calgary Innovation Week . The discussion brought together industry leaders to dissect how innovation can thrive in corporate environments often resistant to change. The challenges, they agreed, are substantial, but the potential rewards for organizations that get it right are transformative.
“Transformative innovation requires pirates,” Mathas said. “It’s not just about solving today’s problems — it’s about being bold and taking risks on where we think the industry is going.” Mathas described her experience at ATB Financial, where her team was tasked with “breaking the bank.
” Operating with a $50,000 budget, they delivered a market-ready banking platform in just five weeks. “We had no banking experience,” she said, “and people didn’t un.
