Building a new-business engine for a global innovation lab

At year end I pitched the lab a different way to run the whole machine: stop treating innovation as a series of projects and run it as a standing engine. That pitch outlived the engagement.

The client

The corporate innovation lab of a global consumer-products group. Its job was to build new growth businesses in Asia, not to write reports about them. It ran a staged pipeline, from raw idea through conviction, test, and first launch.

The engagement began as a narrow benchmarking question and grew into the operating method the lab ran its pipeline on.

The problem

Ideas arrived faster than evidence. A concept a senior sponsor liked could reach a gate review months later and die for a reason never tested at the start. That is an expensive way to learn. The lab wanted two things it did not yet have: a supply of ideas grounded in real market signal, and a disciplined way to kill the weak ones before they consumed a test cycle.

The test

The lane the lab handed over was deliberately outside its core. That was the point. If the method only works where the client already has instincts, it is not a method. The engagement was a trial of whether disciplined discovery and evidence could hold up on ground neither side knew well.

What I built and ran

I rebuilt the front of the pipeline as an evidence machine. Discovery started from market data: commercial databases, a curated source list, and a structured read of where the category was actually moving, worked into a portfolio of concepts a gate review could take seriously.

From that portfolio, two concepts earned the conviction to be tested. They went up against real market evidence, not internal enthusiasm, with a scorecard and gate structure that made every advance or kill an argued decision.

The year-end move

The most consequential deliverable was not a concept. It was the year-end pitch: run the pipeline as a standing engine, with defined stages, gates, governance and a talent model.

Two concepts made it to a live test, on a scorecard, in a lane neither side already knew. The year-end deliverable was the pitch to run the pipeline as a standing engine, and that pitch is what outlived the engagement.

One of a set of engagement and systems case studies. If a problem like this is on your desk, start with a conversation.