Years in Development, No Path to Revenue

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.

Segmentation Isn't Strategy. But It Could Save Yours.

SEGMENTATION ISN'T STRATEGY. BUT IT COULD SAVE YOURS. 

It starts out well enough. A team wants to be more strategic, so they dust off their segmentation framework. They map out customers by size, channel, geography, or product line.

By the end of the quarter, they're still chasing everything. Resources are still spread thin. Growth is still stuck.

Sound familiar?

Segmentation is one of those tools everyone knows they should use. But most don't use it to drive growth.

Here's the tension. Most B2B teams segment to classify their customers. Strong leaders use segmentation to both better understand their customers and make decisions.

That’s the difference between a sales qualification and a strategy tool.

When segmentation works, it's because it clarifies where your business has a right-to-win. It shows how different customer types value different outcomes. It helps you prioritize where to invest, and where to walk away.

The best teams don't treat all segments equally. They ask:

• Which segments reward us most for what we’re uniquely good at?

• Where are we overinvesting with little return?

• Where is the market moving, and how do we keep pace or lead?

This shift drives sharper focus. It improves hit rates. It stops the slow drain of incrementalism.

If your segmentation isn’t helping you say no, it’s not helping you grow.

Why Smart Teams Stall. And What Strong Leaders Do Differently.

WHY SMART TEAMS STALL.

AND WHAT STRONG LEADERS DO DIFFERENTLY.

It starts as quiet friction.

Marketing is testing the value proposition. R&D is running experiments. Sales is under pressure to close the pipeline. Everyone is busy, but they’re not moving together.

Conversations feel circular. Deadlines slip. Priorities shift. Everyone’s working hard, but momentum stalls. Results are missed. And your best people are burning out.

The problem isn’t a shortage of ideas or lack of effort. It’s a lack of clarity.

Teams are working from different definitions of the problem. Because of that, they’re not making real progress. Priorities keep shifting. No one is quite sure who owns the decision.

Sound familiar?

We see this pattern again and again inside large B2B organizations. Well-intended teams pull in different directions, frustrated that their work isn’t gaining traction. Innovation stalls not from a lack of expertise or creativity, but from misalignment.

Without clarity, even high-performing teams focus on the wrong things. Re-work piles. Budgets blow up. Projects fizzle out and die slowly.

This isn’t a people problem. It’s a system problem.

The strongest leaders don’t push harder. They get teams aligned earlier. They insist on clear problem framing. They define roles and decision rights. They make sure everyone’s working from the same assumptions. And they ask the tough questions that matter:

• What is the real problem to be solved?

• Who benefits?

• What does success look like?

• If they don’t use our solution, what else would they do?

When that clarity is in place, the system thrives. Collaboration speeds up. Trade-offs get evaluated. Decisions stick. And teams move together with purpose. Results and impact are delivered.

The Funding Mistake That Silently Kills ROI

THE FUNDING MISTAKE THAT SILENTLY KILLS ROI

There’s a moment we’ve all seen.

We’re under pressure to deliver growth. We need to be more innovative. A big idea lands on the table. It sounds promising. The team is energized. Timelines start forming. And the ask comes quickly: “Can we get funding?”

That’s when the tension hits. You want to move fast. But you also know what’s at stake if the idea isn’t grounded. Missed expectations. Rework. Lost time. Opportunity cost.

What’s really happening in that moment is this: you're being asked to bet on something you can't yet see.

Every idea carries hidden assumptions. Will the customer care? Is the problem real? Will customers buy? The best leaders don't pretend to know. They pause just long enough to make the unknowns visible.

Growth leaders ask the right questions before resources are committed:

• “What must be true for this to work?”

• “How does our proposed solution impact the customer?”

• “What if we’re wrong?”

Then they turn learning into a requirement. Not a phase. Not a box to check. A condition for funding. That means pressure-testing the problem framing, talking with real customers, and quantifying potential value before making the investment decision.

When assumption testing becomes a leadership requirement, everything gets clearer. Confidence goes up. Risk goes down. Decisions move faster because the organization is acting on evidence, not enthusiasm.

Marketing and R&D teams using this approach are changing their odds. By bringing customer evidence into early decisions, they are achieving over 50 percent success rates on new products. That is twice the industry average. These teams avoid wasted spend, build sharper value propositions, and gain speed where it matters most. The difference is not just what they build. It is how early they know whether an idea is worth building at all.

If you’re reviewing business cases that feel more like internal optimism than external validation, it’s time to pause.

Strong decisions come from strong inputs. Surface the assumptions. Test what matters. Then fund what’s real.

Sustainability…An Area for Innovation & Growth?

By Kelly Lawrence, Founder & CEO, Lawrence Innovation

In January, I shared that my commitment in 2022 is to have more fun - both personally and professionally. A key element of “fun” for me is continuous learning. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to collaborate with and learn from other Innovators every month through InnoQuest. I recently had the expanded good fortune of meeting fellow innovators and sustainability experts Danielle Doza and Victoria Avi. These two remarkable female entrepreneurs co-founded Venture Forward Strategies to help companies take actionable steps toward sustainability, defined as positive impacts on people and the environment that contribute to a flourishing planet. They also challenged me to think about sustainability a little differently. So with March being Women’s history month and April focused on Earth Day, what better time to dig into the topic of sustainability and how it relates to innovation and company growth? Thank you to Danielle and Victoria for the inspiration.

Drivers for Sustainability in Business

Earth Day 2022 is themed “Invest In Our Planet.” EarthDay.Org states “This is the moment to change it all — the business climate, the political climate, and how we take action on climate. Now is the time for the unstoppable courage to preserve and protect our health, our families, our livelihoods… together, we must Invest In Our Planet.”

In case that call to action isn’t strong enough to jump start your Discovery engine, in March 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission for the first time said that public companies must tell their shareholders and the federal government how they affect the climate. The New York Times reported that the proposed rule “aims to give investors a clearer picture of the risks that climate change might pose to companies, because of disasters like drought and wildfires, changes in government and environmental policies or consumers’ declining interest in products that contribute to global warming.”

And suddenly, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) referenced in our corporate annual plans just got a lot more real. Almost daily, I see a press release with a company announcing reduced carbon emission targets. Ms. Doza and Ms. Avi have informed me that there continues to be mounting pressure from regulators, governments, stakeholders and consumers for companies to address sustainability and climate change. They kindly advised that the time to build or reassess corporate sustainability strategies - including product line strategy - is now. Doza explains, “the risk and cost of an unstable climate will impact every entity and person on this planet. Climate risks to supply chains will only increase. Stakeholders will only raise pressures for companies to take action. Wherever a company is on their sustainability journey is a good place to start.”

Can Sustainability Positively Impact Corporate and Product Line Profitability?

For those of you who appreciate case studies, Doza shared two. The first story is how Interface leveraged their sustainability strategy to transform their business model and enhance profitability while significantly reducing their carbon footprint. You can read more in this HBR article. The second example is a case study for how Rohner Textiles leveraged their sustainability strategy to create a Cradle-to-Cradle certified product - a fully compostable fabric. The Cradle-to-Cradle Centre provides more information on how the product is Cradle-To-Cradle certified. The case study has also been featured by The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an NGO dedicated to the Circular Economy.

So my fellow innovators, we have proof of concept. There are companies actively engaged in sustainability that are incorporating sustainability into products that are regarded as good for both business results and the environment.

How Can My Company Take Action On Sustainability to Accelerate Results?

In the often overwhelming world of sustainability, where do we start? At the beginning. Let’s break it down. Is sustainability (however your organization defines it) known or unknown? (Note, If any of you claim sustainability is known, I encourage you to open your own consultancy.) Sustainability has a reputation as a big hairy beast in the business and new product development world. New regulation tells us there are trends pushing for change. The signals are there that it’s time to investigate. So, I encourage you to set aside fear, bring out your new market and new technology development tools and apply them to the big broad topic of sustainability.

The AIM Institute argues there are 6 steps to commercialize new technology. Why not apply these to an investigation of sustainability, develop a business case and use the insights to help guide your strategy and tactics? This can be done at the corporate level and at the technology level. In the case of sustainability:

• Accept you are trying to tame a jungle animal - you are not caring for a farm animal or well-understood family pet. You have a lot to learn and there are jungle guides - experts in sustainability - to help us along our journey. Reach out to them.

• Select your first target market segment. Sustainability is a broad topic and means many things to many people. Break it down into meaningful chunks.

• Investigate all assumptions that must be true.

• Explore assumptions about customer unmet needs first.

• Kill projects quickly that can’t go anywhere. Focus on the ones that are meaningful.

• Test the next market segment.

How will you incorporate sustainability into your corporate growth strategy? Into your next innovation? Into your business model for sustainable growth? Contact me, I'd love to hear from you.