To the disrupters go the spoils. Those who disrupt industries can change consumer behavior, alter economics, and transform lives. What caused the once-disruptive Dell’s growth rate and stock price to decline in the mid-2000s, and how might Dell thrive again? What are the lessons for other companies? This study analyzes how innovative cultures are created, lost, and reborn in large companies through the lens of a long-term case study, namely my 13 years at Dell. The research fuses Innovation and Foresight frameworks, principally Curry & Hodgson’s Three Horizons framework and Hill’s Willing and Able framework, and shows that Dell lost its innovation edge when a cultural shift and the pressures of Wall Street crushed risk-taking. It posits that large companies should adopt an “intelligent gambler’s” approach to innovation – namely investing in other companies in order to effectively leverage their significant capital to take intelligent risks in a fast-changing world.