What is missing after a pilot has already worked?

Andy Binns and Christine Griffin, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review on 12 April 2023, reported a project on new ventures inside large companies. They studied ventures at 31 global corporations, interviewed executives at each, and surveyed 150 executives. Their illustration is Best Buy's move into health. In 2018 the retailer announced it would enter that market, starting from the problem of people aging safely at home, and then tested its assumptions in market. By 2022, on the authors' account, Best Buy Health was a revenue-generating unit: a $525 million business, projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 35% to 45% through 2027.

The authors describe three disciplines a new business has to move through: ideation, incubation, and scaling. One public finding is enough to ruin a cheerful portfolio review. While 80% of companies claim to ideate and incubate new ventures, only 16% successfully scale them. Scaling, in their telling of Best Buy, meant a unit that could sit beside the existing business. A pilot that stays a pilot is not that unit.

A worked pilot is still an incubation result

Binns and Griffin's explanation is uncomfortable for teams that are proud of their method. The ways of ideation and incubation are widely taught. They name design thinking and lean startup in particular. On their account, few methodologies guide the decision to scale. A pilot that worked is evidence about a proposition under special conditions. It is not yet a decision to fund, staff, and run the thing inside the line.

This is a later stall than a calendar full of activity and an empty product pipeline. Why large organisations get better at process than at new products is about that earlier pattern: process people end up in charge, and workshops stand in for a product. You can get past it and still stop. The pilot team is not the operating team. The waiver that made the pilot fast is not a way of working the line can keep. Nobody has a discipline for the handoff, so the handoff is a meeting, and then it is a memory.

What the line is actually being asked to absorb

A successful pilot often proves a narrow case. A willing crew. A founder inside the firm who answered every question in the corridor. A process waived because a sponsor asked. The line is not being asked to admire that case. It is being asked to own a cost that survives an ordinary budget round, an owner who already runs today's work, and a stop rule for the week the waiver expires.

Without those, the pilot is a guest on a steering agenda until a newer guest arrives. If your pack counts pilots launched, and not results now owned inside a line report, you are measuring the two disciplines Binns and Griffin say are already crowded. Their 80% and 16% describe corporate ventures, not every small trial of a tool. Use the gap as a warning about where attention goes. Do not paste it onto your portfolio and call it a prediction.

A lean startup and product sprint can force a keep, change, or stop on one bet. Stopping is a result. Keeping only starts the discipline they say is missing.

Four questions before you fund another one

Ask them of the pilot you already have, before you congratulate it.

1. If this holds, which existing team has to run it, and have they said yes in their own planning round?
2. Which waiver is keeping it alive, and what replaces that waiver on a named date?
3. Which number, in the line's own report, would show it is no longer a side project?
4. Who can kill it after it has a sponsor, a slide, and a nickname?

If the four have no answers, fund the handoff or end the bet while the learning is fresh. Another demonstration is incubation, repeated.

Source: Andy Binns and Christine Griffin, "The Missing Discipline Behind Failure to Scale", MIT Sloan Management Review, 12 April 2023. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-missing-discipline-behind-failure-to-scale/