YEARS IN DEVELOPMENT. NO PATH TO REVENUE.
There's a moment I've seen more times than I can count. I bet you’ve seen it too. A technology has been in development for years. The science is impressive. The internal champions are passionate. And somewhere along the way, millions of dollars have been committed with no clear answer to the most basic question: will anyone buy this?
I've been called in to save projects like this, both as a corporate leader at a Fortune top 10 company and as an outside partner. The pattern is almost always the same. The organization has invented something. And invention got mistaken for innovation.
They are not the same thing. Invention is creating something new. Innovation is when your unique capabilities, real customer unmet needs, and market viability come together to solve a problem that generates meaningful revenue for your company and meaningful impact for your customer. Without all three, you don't have innovation. You have a solution in search of a problem. Sound familiar?
The reason it keeps happening is not incompetence. It is pressure. Propose something. Show traction. Move fast. Under that kind of pressure, teams skip the front end because it feels slow. Understanding the customer's world feels like delay. But speed without context is the most expensive mistake in innovation. Budgets overrun. Business cases collapse. And by the time the market is consulted, the sunk cost makes an honest conversation almost impossible.
Strong leaders break this cycle by enabling their teams to work in the right order. Not by doing the work themselves, but by creating the conditions for it to be done well. That means setting the expectation that teams start by understanding everything about the customer's world before a solution is named. From there, teams identify the problem worth solving, test and validate their choices, and only then decide on the best solution path. That sequence feels slower at the front. It is dramatically faster to commercial return.
This is lean voice of customer in practice. It is not a research project. It is an assumption test. It answers the question every innovation team should ask before they build: does this problem matter enough, to enough customers, that solving it will generate real return?
Research from Robert Cooper's Winning at New Products, The AIM Institute, and MIT Sloan puts B2B new product hit rates below 25%. No other function in the business tolerates a 75% failure rate. Innovation shouldn't either.
If your pipeline feels full but your commercialization results feel thin, the problem is likely upstream. And that is exactly where it is easiest to course-correct.