The Cardboard Phone And The Innovation Boundary

Insight by Darryll Colthrust, March 11, 2026

My nine-year-old daughter built a phone.

She cut it from cardboard, printed a screen, glued on paper buttons and proudly spent twenty minutes explaining the apps she designed. One lets you talk to animals. Another orders pizza by reading your mind. Over the holidays, she “messaged” her friends so they could read the conversations when school resumed.

The phone did not work. The apps were impossible. But that wasn’t the point.

She wasn’t building a product. She was building confidence. She was stretching her understanding of what a phone could be. For her, this was thrillingly new.

Every organisation has a version of that cardboard-phone moment. A stage where experimentation matters more than execution and where the act of trying expands the horizon of what feels possible.

But horizons do not expand on their own.

There is an invisible line inside every company, the boundary between what feels normal and what feels genuinely new. Markets move that line constantly. Sometimes it is gradual, but sometimes it jumps all at once: when the internet scaled; when the iPhone launched; or when generative AI became widely accessible.

These moments did not just introduce new capabilities. They redefined what “innovative” meant for everyone, everywhere. The boundary shifted, whether companies were ready or not.

Standing still is not neutral. In Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that it takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place, and if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast. That is the reality of innovation in a market where boundaries shift every quarter. The most common corporate instinct is to innovate from necessity, to wait until competitive pressure or technological disruption forces action. That logic works when change is slow and predictable. It fails in a Red Queen’s race, where the landscape moves beneath your feet. Running to keep pace is not progress. It is survival. Stopping, even briefly, means falling behind. The choice is not whether to move. It is whether to move before the line is moved for you.

While the market's line only moves forward, a company's line can quietly regress. Skills atrophy, culture ossifies, and technical debt accumulates. By the time the gap becomes visible, it may already be difficult to close. This is when companies call code red, which is just the Red Queen's race acknowledged too late: the moment an organisation realises it stopped running while the ground kept moving.

The organisations that navigate these market jumps best are not reacting to crises. They are building capability before necessity forces their hand. They experiment from strength, not desperation. They develop institutional muscle while others wait for proof. That is the posture we have chosen across Holtzbrinck.

In years past, we were described as a publishing group. More fundamentally, we are a knowledge ecosystem at the intersection of scientific discovery, education, news, media and technology. Our responsibility is to ensure that ideas and information continue to move across text, audio, data, visual media, and into formats that do not yet have names.

A company that defines itself by format fixes its innovation boundary in place. A company that defines itself by the quality of its ideas and the depth of its expertise can extend those ideas wherever audiences go next.

Holtzbrinck has a long history of moving before it had to. Nature began as a bold wager in 1869. Digital Science was incubated in 2010 to build research technology distinct from traditional publishing structures. These were not defensive reactions, but deliberate expansions of what knowledge businesses could become. CHAPTR, founded in 2022, is the latest expression of that instinct.

Our investment in AI follows the same principle.

At CHAPTR, we chose to build capability early. We’ve experimented, failed, iterated and embedded AI fluency into our culture. Each cycle strengthened our institutional muscle, technical depth, pattern recognition and risk tolerance. That compounding advantage is not accidental. It is intentional.

We don’t aim to create a new venture every time change is required. The goal is to embed boundary-moving behavior across our ecosystem, to make exploration part of how we operate, not an exception. Innovation theatre is easy. Cultural transformation is harder. It requires discipline, leadership and the willingness to raise standards over time.

Which brings me back to the cardboard phone.

When my daughter showed me her invention, I did not critique the engineering. I encouraged her. That is the right response at the beginning, as a parent, or as a leader. Early confidence fuels future capability.

But leadership evolves.

At some point, encouragement alone is not enough. Standards must rise, questions must get sharper, and execution must match imagination. Pretending the cardboard phone still works when she is capable of building something real would not be kindness. It would be a ceiling.

Organisations face the same tension. In the early stages of exploration, you celebrate experimentation. As capability grows, you demand rigour. Moving the line requires belief and accountability; curiosity and discipline; courage and integrity.

We are entering an era where the tools of innovation are radically more accessible. Non-engineers can prototype software by describing what they want. Concepts can be pressure-tested in hours, not months. The barrier between idea and execution is collapsing.

Innovation will happen. The pace will not slow. The only real question is who shapes what comes next.

At Holtzbrinck, we are not waiting for the market to redraw our boundary for us. We are building the capability to move it ourselves, deliberately, continuously and across our ecosystem.

And that is how ideas - even a cardboard phone - continue to shape the future.

 

Darryll Colthrust is Co-CEO at CHAPTR, which is part of the Holtzbrinck group, and serves as Holtzbrinck AI Board Advisor.