Scaling Innovation Beyond a Single Team
Summary
- Fund a scale-up only after the pilot team delivers an evidence pack built from its own retrospectives, outcome data, and a survey of how employees and managers see innovation.
- Require each business unit to adapt the approach to its own context instead of copying the pilot team’s practices unchanged.
- Present the case to leaders in operating terms, such as costs and margins, and recruit middle managers as champions before launch.
- Pay for a facilitator training program, budget facilitator time explicitly, and train managers in how to respond to the ideas their teams raise.
- Create a governed tier of roughly 10 to 20 strategic innovation projects with a portfolio office, and give the rest of the work a lighter path.
- Set the target mix of incremental, semi-radical, and radical work, and review the portfolio against it on a fixed cadence.
- Track kill rate, idea-to-approval time, and conversion of approved projects alongside financial results.
- Make retrospectives and knowledge sharing a standing routine so that each team’s lessons reach the next one.
Why scaling fails when it is copied rather than adapted
A first innovation team that works well creates a tempting conclusion: do the same thing everywhere. The record on organizational change argues for caution. In one study of large organizations that had each implemented at least one change program, only 30% produced bottom-line improvement that exceeded the company’s cost of capital (Isaksen & Tidd, 2006, p. 2). The causes often lie in how the change is led rather than in the idea itself. A common shortcoming is for a senior management team to design and announce a major change effort without involving others, then rely on training alone, which usually results in ineffective implementation (Isaksen & Tidd, 2006, p. 2).
Structural shortcuts do not fare better. Innovation centers or corporate ventures typically see about half fail, mainly because of problems integrating with the rest of the organization, territorial infringements, and culture clashes with the parent firm (Isaksen & Tidd, 2006, p. 2). That should concern any leader whose innovation team sits slightly apart from the business. Success inside the team says little about whether the rest of the organization will accept what the team does.
Copying is the other trap. Approaches that worked in their original context often disappoint elsewhere because other organizations assumed they could be copied without adapting or customizing them (Isaksen & Tidd, 2006, p. 3). Your pilot team’s practices are no exception. What transfers well is the underlying purpose of each practice, while the specific routines need to be reshaped by the people who will use them.
The practical alternative is to expand in stages. A pilot-and-learn approach, rather than a big-bang launch, allows an organization to keep a mixed economy in which not every project fits the new template (Bessant, 2018, p. 240). In concrete terms, that means bringing in one or two units at a time, letting each adjust the approach, and carrying what they learn into the next wave. It also means accepting that some projects in some units will keep running the old way, and deciding deliberately which ones.
Takeaway: Treat scaling as adaptation with each business unit, not as the rollout of a fixed template.
Build the roadshow from your own evidence
A roadshow that argues for wider adoption is only as persuasive as the evidence behind it, and your own teams are the best source. Pilots give a team the chance to collect data that can help convince skeptics that an approach works in the company’s particular context (Bessant, 2018, p. 241). That matters because the skeptics are rarely abstract. Lack of management support, often rooted in concerns about losing control of projects, is one of the areas where agile projects often run aground (Bessant, 2018, p. 240).
Pitch the evidence in the audience’s terms. To win over reluctant managers, answer “What’s in it for me?” in the language managers speak, such as operating costs and margins (Bessant, 2003, p. 101). Do not present the program as something handed down from above, either. Involving middle managers in development, rather than imposing the program from above, and identifying management champions helps build support (Bessant, 2003, p. 101). Research on early adopters points the same way: it recommends legitimating an innovation through reference customers and visible performance advantage, and collaborating with opinion leaders (Tidd & Bessant, 2018, p. 530). Inside a company, your reference customers are the first teams and the business units that sponsored them.
The raw material for the evidence should come from retrospectives, which many organizations skip. Most organizations measure outcomes but do little with the information gathered, and most do not examine the lessons learned from the last project (White & Bruton, 2011, p. 175). A retrospective at the end of each innovation initiative can record the learning produced, and evaluation of innovation projects is often neglected despite being highly instructive (Sauzet, 2026, p. 47). If your teams have run retrospectives, you already hold findings about what worked, what did not, and what each cycle changed. Group them by theme, and show how the approach improved from one iteration to the next.
Add a view of how people actually experience innovation, because leaders and staff often see it differently. In one large company, a survey of employees and managers revealed that managers believed staff knew they were responsible for improvement, while many employees said they made few suggestions because they did not see it as part of their role (Bessant, 2003, p. 204). A gap like that is a compelling slide for an executive audience, since it shows a problem the current approach has not solved. To keep the case credible, include a comparison with others as well. An audit tool can serve as a benchmark showing whether an organization is doing things as well as others, and as a guide to continuous improvement (Tidd & Bessant, 2018, p. 893).
Takeaway: Assemble three kinds of evidence before the first presentation – retrospective findings, a perception survey, and reference teams – and frame them in the leaders’ own operating terms.
Train the trainers before you scale
Scaling multiplies demand for facilitation faster than any one team can supply it, so the first investment should be in people who can teach and coach others. Enabling participation among people who have not been part of innovation work requires a significant investment in basic training, followed by regular opportunities to practice the skills (Bessant, 2003, p. 101). The scale of that investment can be large. A major diesel engine manufacturer gave every employee a minimum of three days of training, added further inputs for those responsible for facilitating, and invested around 16,000 person days during its 18-month start-up period (Bessant, 2003, p. 101).
The content matters as much as the volume. A large aerospace contractor’s program for working across functions covered team building, interpersonal skills, and facilitation, plus a separate leadership module, and it had participants work on real organizational problems (Bessant, 2003, p. 102). Practice on real problems is a sound design principle for a trainer program. Innovation is something learned by doing and reflecting, so classroom-based models may be incomplete even though they can provide foundations (Bessant et al., 2024, p. 24). Candidate trainers should therefore co-facilitate a live session before they run one alone.
Your first teams are the natural source of those trainers. Starting small lets an organization build a team that can become evangelists and experts to help spread the principles, although external support may be needed early to teach the tools (Bessant, 2018, p. 240).
Repsol offers an example of how a network of facilitators can grow. It held the first edition of its Facilitators Training Program in 2013, and by 2014 its innovation network had grown to around 75 innovation and improvement teams (Kerzner, 2023, p. 237; Kerzner, 2023, p. 238).
Do not forget the managers, who decide whether new ideas get a response. After pilots of an idea-sharing scheme, the company realized that managers needed training to support their role in responding to ideas, rather than assuming they knew how (Bessant, 2003, p. 205). Persuading managers to deliver training themselves is a very effective way of getting them to understand what the program is really about (Bessant, 2003, p. 101). Asking a skeptical director to teach a module on how to respond to a team’s proposal may do more than any briefing.
Facilitation also takes time, and budgets rarely account for it. Coordinators in that pilot spent between one and one and a half days a week on the scheme, which would have meant roughly 50 new full-time jobs across the whole workforce (Bessant, 2003, p. 205). Planning for that load before launch avoids burning out the people you most need.
Finally, build in local ownership and support. That company spent six to eight weeks preparing each area before launch, customizing the scheme locally so that ownership transferred from the corporate center to the local business (Bessant, 2003, p. 206). Support structures included a help desk, a workbench where coordinators could try out tools, and a newsletter every two weeks that encouraged coordinators to network with one another (Bessant, 2003, p. 206).
Takeaway: Build the trainer curriculum around practice on real problems, budget facilitator hours explicitly, and include managers in the training.
Govern the portfolio as the program grows
Once many teams are producing ideas, someone has to decide which ones receive resources. Few people in a company understand how innovation projects are selected and prioritized, and a portfolio or strategic project management office brings a more structured selection process (Kerzner, 2023, p. 70). Transparency is half the value, because people who understand the rules are more willing to accept the outcomes.
Governance should be selective. A portfolio office generally governs only the projects most critical to long-term success, typically 10 to 20 strategic projects at a time, and not every innovation project requires its involvement (Kerzner, 2023, p. 70). Innovation may require a different form of governance than day-to-day business, and portfolio decision making should be emphasized over silo decision making while avoiding analysis paralysis (Kerzner, 2023, p. 177). The level of oversight can follow the level of risk: the greater the unknowns, risks, and uncertainties in a project, the greater the involvement of the innovation portfolio office (Kerzner, 2023, p. 178). Small, familiar improvements can move through a lighter path.
The case for doing this is empirical. In a study of 292 firms, portfolio management was associated with superior innovation and financial performance, and firms that used benchmarking and scoring to inform their portfolios outperformed those that did not (Tidd & Bessant, 2018, p. 302). The same source offers a caution. Screening tools work only if corporate will exists to implement their recommendations, and the majority of 885 firms studied performed poorly at this stage, often failing to kill weak concepts (Tidd & Bessant, 2018, p. 302). A governance body that never stops a project is not governing.
Stopping projects has its own communication cost. Decisions to stop projects as part of portfolio decision making are harder to explain to employees than decisions to stop a project because of disappointing results at a gate (van den Ende, 2021, p. 137). Teams cannot control portfolio trade-offs, so leaders owe them a clear explanation of the reasoning and, where possible, a path for the people and the learning to move elsewhere.
Balance deserves the same attention as selection. Senior management bears responsibility for a balanced portfolio of incremental, semi-radical, and radical innovations, because an imbalance decreases return and increases vulnerability (Davila et al., 2006, p. 40). Leaders should specify how much innovation they want, communicate the priorities and trade-offs, and repeat the message until it sinks in (Davila et al., 2006, p. 100). Set the target mix explicitly, then review the actual portfolio against it each quarter.
Measurement should follow the same logic. Governance personnel can organize their reviews around three questions: whether the organization is doing the right things, doing them right, and doing enough of them (Kerzner, 2023, p. 298). Useful governance metrics include the number of ideas killed, the time from idea generation to project approval, and the percentage of approved projects that were completed and commercialized (Kerzner, 2023, p. 298; Kerzner, 2023, p. 299). Mix leading and lagging signals. Process measures are real-time signals that can indicate a need to change course, while output measures are lagging because they report after the effort is done (Davila et al., 2006, p. 156). A dashboard that shows only revenue will tell leaders about problems long after they could have acted.
Takeaway: Put the 10 to 20 most strategic projects under a portfolio office, set the target innovation mix, and report kill rate and conversion alongside financial results.
Keep learning as the program spreads
A scaled program is never finished. No organization starts with a perfectly developed capability to manage innovation; it learns by trial and error and gradually reinforces the behaviors that work into routines (Tidd & Bessant, 2018, p. 894). The leadership job is to make that learning deliberate. Periodic reflection can ask what to do more of, what to do less of or stop, and what new routines are needed (Tidd & Bessant, 2018, p. 894). Those three questions work equally well for a single team and for the whole program, so hold the reflection at both levels.
Retrospectives are the main source of material, and they work best when their findings are sorted. Retrospective findings can be separated into learning, the potential to transfer that learning to other initiatives, and the project’s positive and negative impacts (Sauzet, 2026, p. 47). The middle category is the one that scaling depends on, because it identifies what another team could use tomorrow.
Capturing lessons is not enough if nobody reads them. Capturing knowledge has little value if employees cannot access it or are not incentivized to use it, so leaders need to encourage collaboration and break down silos (Benraouane & Harrington, 2021, p. 147). Someone has to own the movement of lessons between teams. A central innovation group can play a catalytic role by organizing conversations about innovation, supporting contests and campaigns on a collaboration platform, and building external networks (Bessant, 2018, p. 262). That group does not need to run every initiative; its value is in connecting the people who do.
Time is the quiet constraint. Making improvement part of everyday work through regular process reviews, rather than an optional extra, helps overcome the lack of time and space in daily operations (Bessant, 2003, p. 101). One recommended way to make time for improvement is to set aside half an hour each week for employees to discuss their work processes, after which formally earmarked time is no longer necessary once the practice is established (Bessant, 2003, p. 100). A small, protected slot like this costs little, and it keeps the routines from fading once the launch energy is gone.
Takeaway: Schedule recurring retrospectives at the team and program levels, and assign a central group to move lessons between teams.
Bibliography
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