Why corporates should hire innovation teams, not freelancers

When innovation managers at corporate companies are tasked with launching new ventures or accelerating digital transformation, they often run into the same dilemma:
Do we hire a few freelancers, assign internal staff, or bring in a dedicated team?

At first glance, individual freelancers might seem like the more flexible, budget-friendly option. But when the pressure is on to deliver real results, fast, focused, and future-ready, there’s a strong case for hiring a complete innovation team instead.

Here’s why.

1. Speed and flexibility without the setup time

Innovation is all about momentum. When you hire individuals, you spend precious weeks (sometimes months) onboarding, aligning, defining roles, and trying to build team chemistry. With a dedicated team, that dynamic already exists. They show up with the structure, process, and rhythm in place. Ready to go on day one. And if one individual does not fit the project, the team can fill the gap.

This makes a huge difference in corporate environments where timelines are tight and internal bureaucracy already slows things down.

2. Cross-functional by design

Real innovation doesn’t live in silos. For a successful corporate venture, you need strategy, validation, design, growth hacking, sales and other capabilities to all work in sync. That’s difficult to achieve when you’re piecing together freelancers and internal staff from different backgrounds.

With a purpose-built team, you’re getting cross-functional expertise baked in, a group that already knows how to collaborate, communicate, and ship together. No friction, no handovers, no blame games. Just forward motion.

3. Clear ownership, less micromanagement

Innovation teams are typically self-managing. They own their domain, make decisions fast, and don’t wait for permission to act. That frees up your internal managers and stakeholders to focus on strategy and governance, not babysitting.

Still wondering how your company can really trust an external team?

Simple: embed at least one corporate team member directly into the innovation squad. This avoids the classic disconnect where internal stakeholders question external findings. Instead, they’re part of interviews, insight-gathering, and key decisions. When internal staff hear customers firsthand, there’s no gap in understanding, just faster alignment, stronger buy-in, and less need for micromanagement.

In a corporate setting where internal bandwidth is limited, that’s not just nice to have, it’s essential.

4. Consistency over time

Freelancers come and go. That’s the nature of the model. And when they do, they often take their knowledge with them. This makes continuity and knowledge sharing a real challenge in longer innovation cycles.

Teams, on the other hand, build systems for documentation, handovers, and knowledge transfer. Even if individual team members rotate, the team as a whole maintains momentum, and your project doesn't lose its memory.

5. Outcomes > Output

Sure, freelancers might be cheaper on paper. But innovation isn’t about being cheap, it’s about creating something valuable. A single well-aligned team can do in weeks what a fragmented group of freelancers might take months to figure out.

In other words: teams deliver outcomes, not just output. That’s what moves the needle inside large organizations.

6. Freelance hiring is about to get riskier (Wet DBA, 2025)

Starting January 1st, 2025, new rules around the Dutch “Wet DBA” (Law Deregulation Assessment of Employment Relationships) have taken effect. In short:

Hiring freelancers will come with more legal risk for employers.

The update gives the Belastingdienst (Dutch tax authority) more enforcement power to tackle false self-employment. If a freelancer is deemed to be working in an employer–employee relationship, your company could face back taxes, fines, and other liabilities.

This is especially tricky for long-term projects where freelancers work under your supervision, on-site or structurally embedded in your teams, which is precisely how many corporate innovation initiatives are run today.

So what’s the alternative?

Hiring a team through a third party, like an agency or venture studio, removes that risk. You’re not hiring individuals, you’re engaging a service provider with clear deliverables and contractual boundaries. That keeps things legally clean and operationally effective.

Why this is relevant for Dutch corporates

In the Netherlands and across the Benelux, corporates face increasing pressure to innovate faster, while still being accountable, compliant, and aligned with business strategy. But innovation doesn’t thrive in traditional structures. It needs the flexibility and velocity of a startup, without losing sight of the corporate context.

Hiring a full-stack innovation team gives you both.

The startup mindset and speed

• The discipline and structure to operate within corporate constraints

• The capacity to test, learn, and pivot, without dragging down internal teams

Bottom line?

If you’re building something new, a venture, a product, or a strategic experiment, don’t go hunting for freelancers.
Hire a team that’s already done this before, together. It’s faster, safer, and more effective.

Need one? Say hi.