Picture the review meeting where a genuinely good invention dies. The prototype works, the lab is proud of it, and the team walks in with a deck full of what the technology can do.

Across the table sit the people who hold the budget. They listen politely — and then, disappointingly, fund something else. The invention was never the problem. The pitch was all product and no person.

An invention like this rarely stalls because the technology is weak — it stalls because no one built a product story: the case for who it is for, what they cannot do today, and why it matters enough to fund. That story is the real leverage that turns a working prototype into something the organization pays to build — but most teams reach for it far too late, if they reach for it at all.

Deirdre Walters, founding partner at Untapped Innovation, puts it bluntly: the product story isn't a soft marketing extra — it's core R&D work and the thing that unlocks capital. Written before anything else, it decides whether an invention gets funded and built at all.

The proof is Kimberly Clark’s Andrex brand. A single insight rebuilt the entire production line, and the upgrade became their best-ever testing concept, Product of the Year, and the UK's number-one tissue. What follows is the framework behind this outcome, and the 25% test that tells a leader in two minutes whether their team’s own pitch will land.

Concept development eats more time in most organizations than anyone budgets for. Teams generate a concept, test it, watch it come back weak, rework it, and test again.

These constant rework loops go back to a single, bad habit: teams write the headline first, before they have the facts. Think about a journalist writing a story: first, they gather the facts; then they find the angle; and finally, they write the headline. Innovation teams tend to reverse the order, opening with a catchy concept and filling in the reasoning afterward. This is why so many concepts collapse under testing.

When a team leads with the technology and opens a pitch with the full list of features its prototype delivers, the people who control the budget have no way to see why any of it matters. A feature list gives a finance lead nothing to consider, for instance. On the other hand, a clear account of a user's unmet need, the reason existing options fail them, and the change the product creates gives that same finance lead a case to fund.

But finance is only one of the multiple decision-makers in the room. An invention has to clear R&D leadership, marketing, sales, a board — the list goes on. And the pitch that wins one of those stakeholders then has to survive being retold by people who were not in the room. Eventually, the same invention is told multiple different ways, and no single account survives the trip through the organization.

This is why a product story that every stakeholder can carry matters so much. It gives each core function one version to repeat — the same story in the sales rep's pitch, the operations lead's memo, and the marketing team’s notes.

Mastering the story that every stakeholder understands in the same way requires depth. Deirdre borrows her discipline from journalism — and advises innovation teams to think like investigative reporters, chasing the “real” angle. Each assumption is pressure-tested with three questions, before it earns a place in the product story:

The three questions push a team past the surface of what users buy, into the reasons they buy it, the workarounds they tolerate, and the pains they have stopped noticing. Those are the things users often cannot name — so reaching them takes real digging.

Chasing the deeper insight is worth it because a competitor cannot easily copy what your team had to dig for. For example, “people want a cleaner floor” is obvious and available to anyone; the reason a user has quietly given up on their current mop is the less evident insight a team worked for.

The payoff shows up in testing. Untapped Innovation reports that concepts built this way test better with consumers, prototypes beat their benchmarks, and the resulting claims and demos hold up in both qualitative and quantitative research.

All of this assumes a team knows what a product story actually is, and how it differs from a concept or a feature list. That is where most teams go wrong. Deirdre's framework is built to close that gap, and unlike most storytelling advice, which is written for marketers aiming at consumers, hers is built for R&D and for the internal sell. It starts with specifics: what a story contains, and how to build one.

First, a product story runs longer than most teams expect, consisting of several passages that set up a user’s situation and follow it through, until they reach a better one. Importantly — it is not the concept, the spec, the claims, or the feature list, as many innovation teams think. The story is the layer underneath all of these:

Second, what makes a story bigger than a feature list is who stands at its center. In a product story, Deirdre argues that the user is the hero and the product is the mentor, a concept familiar to innovation leaders who have followed Donald Miller's StoryBrand framework or sat through any number of positioning workshops.

Even if innovation leaders are aware that the user should be at the center, most teams are still writing their story with the product as the hero. This shows where the airtime goes: the pitch fills its minutes with what the technology does, while the user appears once as a target segment and disappears. Every sentence is about the product, and no one in the room understands why they should care — and by extension — why they should fund. That is why leaving the user out is not just a presentation flaw. It is why the money goes elsewhere.

When the user is back in the lead, the same facts change shape. The technology stops being the point and becomes the thing that carries the user somewhere they could not reach alone. This is also what makes the story bigger than the feature list it replaces: a feature is a fact about the product, while the same feature, told through the hero, becomes a reason someone's life gets better.

Finally, before the product comes up at all, the team has to nail the user's needs, both the functional need (the task to get done) and the emotional need (how they want to feel once it is done). The test is whether those needs are deep and frequent. A shallow or occasional need will not carry an innovation; a deep, everyday one, the kind that shows up again and again and wears on someone's life, is what makes a problem worth solving and worth funding. Only once the need clears that bar does the team earn the right to talk about the product.

Before the story gets built, an innovation team should prepare the core insights. The first three steps gather the raw material, the fourth shapes it, and the fifth is the writing stage:

The steps should be followed in order. Deirdre asks teams to “put the prototype on ice” through the first three steps and describe the user in full before describing the invention.

Step four is where the team’s effort pays back: one body of user research can create several separate themes. A prominent example is Nike, which split their research into three themes: independent living, individuality, and dexterity.

Step five is about converting the themes into stories. To write the story, Deirdre urges teams to use the following four-chapter arc.

Once a team has extracted the user, product and trend insights and identified themes, they are ready to build the product story. Deirdre and her team took the classic hero's journey, a twelve-step structure behind many films and novels, and distilled it to four “chapters” an innovation team can actually use.

Each chapter answers one main question. Combined, they move the hero from today's world to tomorrow's:

Notice that the product only takes up one chapter in four, 25% of the story. That number is not incidental. It is the fastest test of whether a story is working — and it is worth running on your own last pitch.

Kimberly Clark sent Untapped Innovation a brief to upgrade Andrex, its best-selling toilet tissue, around a cleaner feel. The project began in eight homes, watching how people clean and asking what worked and what did not with the tissue they used. Since toilet tissue makes for awkward conversation, the discussion widened to cleaning in general.

What the team noticed was that consumers kept mentioning microfiber cloths. Pressed on why, several pulled a cloth apart to show the raised, three-dimensional weave: it lifts dirt, they explained, and still feels soft. Their toilet tissue was flat by comparison, and they described it as “pushing dirt around rather than lifting it away”.

The contrast exposed the root cause. People were using flat tissue over and over to feel clean, and all that reusing left skin sore. The user wish underneath was simple: people wanted tissue that cleaned as thoroughly as a rough cloth, yet stayed as gentle as soft paper. Untapped's ideation workshops turned that wish into a three-dimensional wave texture, sketched on paper first, then engineered into sheets that glide across the skin, lift dirt with less wiping, and leave it comfortable.

The Andrex project ran the five steps in order. The home visits, the microfiber discovery, the market context, all of it was steps one to three, the user, product and trend work done before anyone committed to a design. Only once that was in hand, did the team reach step five and write the story as a four-chapter arc:

The team understood the problem completely before they built the answer to it. The 3D Wave texture came last, shaped to fit a need the first three chapters had already spelled out. Most teams do the opposite. They start with a technology they can build and then go looking for someone who wants it. Andrex worked because it started with the person, not the product.

The concept became Kimberly Clark's best-ever testing concept, a position it still held six years on. Andrex launched the upgrade as Classic Clean in 2021 on its 3D Wave texture technology, won Product of the Year, and continued to hold its price through a cost-of-living squeeze that pushed shoppers toward cheaper alternatives across the category.

Nike's Go FlyEase case study has a different angle than Andrex’s: how a single body of research becomes several stories.

Just like with Andrex, steps one to three gather the raw material:

Step four is where one set of research splits into several themes. Nike came up with three themes, each with its own user wish:

Finally, step five writes each theme into its own story, through the four-chapter arc. For the independent living example:

The three stories were only the beginning. The same research defined a whole platform: what launched as Nike's first hands-free shoe expanded to more than ten models within its first years, from the Pegasus runner to LeBron's signature to the Air Jordan 1, and the technology now anchors a permanent easy-on collection Nike has since rebranded EasyOn. One study, three stories, and a line still shipping new products five years on.

Put Andrex and Nike together and the payback comes into focus. One disciplined pass at the user's world produces an asset a team draws on for years, upstream of any single concept or campaign. For an innovation leader defending a research budget in a portfolio review, the argument shifts from funding a piece of insight work to funding a multi-year pipeline from one investment.

Innovation rarely fails for lack of good inventions. It fails in the gap between a working prototype and an organization willing to fund it, build it, and put its name behind it. The product story is what closes that gap, because it gives everyone who has to say yes — the finance lead, the operations lead, the marketing team, and eventually the shopper — one version of the truth they can all repeat.

That is the part most teams miss. They treat the product story as a marketing job for after the product exists, when it is the thing that unlocks the money to build it in the first place. Andrex is the proof: the same story about a torn microfiber cloth is what convinced a factory to rebuild its production line, and the results followed: a best-ever testing concept for Kimberly Clark, Product of the Year, and a price it held through a cost-of-living squeeze that pulled the rest of the category down.

This is why the product story cannot be the thing marketing writes at the end — it is what earns an invention its budget, carries it through every room that can kill it, and turns a promising prototype into a product the business actually builds. The technology gets an invention as far as the lab. The story is what gets it funded.

Innovation at a 65-year-old research institute was scattered and stuck — so leadership commissioned a cross-functional group to find out why. The group spent weeks in focus groups and interviews, expecting the familiar culprits: too few ideas, too little funding. But that expectation was wrong. Ideas were everywhere, internal money was available — but innovation still went nowhere.

The group found the answer somewhere leadership rarely looks: the organization was simply lacking a shared story. The word innovation meant something different in every room, so no single account of the work traveled across its 6,000 staff. And no one owned the job of pulling it together — up to that moment.

The institute created a dedicated innovation department to fill the gap. The newly-appointed Senior Director of Corporate Innovation built it from scratch: a small central team, with innovation leads embedded in each business unit, all with a mandate from the CEO. But structure alone does not make a new department real to 6,000 people, and the diagnosis shows why: the missing piece was a story, not a system. So the Director made storytelling the department's first job, teaching the organization to tell its own innovation story, from the executive team to the lab bench.

Most innovation storytelling points outward, at the market; this one points inward, at the organization itself. The steps below lay out the how, and it starts with the one thing more ideas and more money could never supply: a shared definition of innovation.

Every story downstream depends on one shared definition of innovation. Without a definition, the word carries a different meaning in each function, and multiple versions of the same work circulate at once. The institute’s definition of innovation is deliberately wide: anyone can innovate, including staff well outside the technology and AI teams, and anyone can carry an idea to impact. That breadth means more of the work counts as innovation, so more teams have a story to tell.

The best material for an innovation story already sits in the organization's history. The move here is to look past the famous breakthroughs to the smaller, forgotten projects where innovation happened — without them ever being called innovation.

For example, the institute ran a project where ordinary community members (citizen scientists, teachers and janitors among them), helped detect lead contamination in schools' drinking water. None of the community members would have used the word innovator for themselves, which is exactly why the story works: it shows innovation as something ordinary people across the institute already do. These stories lead with the people and the teamwork — not the technology — and follow the ideas to the product they become. Retold across 65 years of work, they turn "anyone can innovate" from a slogan into something staff recognize in their own past.

A newly built innovation function has to win over the whole organization at once, from the executives who fund it to the teams who have to work with it. A single version of the same story rarely lands with a CFO and a frontline team alike.

The team resolved this through a shared challenge. They knew that executives respond to the big picture (how innovation fits the growth strategy and the 2030 North Star) whereas staff respond to something closer to home: a colleague like them carrying an idea somewhere real. Their fix was to keep one story, but change the opening depending on the audience. The team named three audiences to start — the executive team, business-unit leaders, and all staff — worked out what each one valued, and used a different opening for each of them. Told this way, the same story wins over both the leaders who fund the work and the staff who carry it out.

Once the story exists, it has to reach people again and again. Most innovation teams build a brand-new program to carry a story forward; however, incorporating a story is a slow process and easy to ignore.

The institute already had a place for their stories: a research showcase it had run for years, where teams presented their projects on posters. The problem was that this ritual spotlighted just the research — so the innovation inside each project went unseen. To fix this, the team reframed the ritual. It kept the research showcase event, but reframed each poster to tell the innovation story behind the project.

The new showcase surfaced spin-outs colleagues did not know existed, and one attendee was struck by how much innovation the institute already had underway. Now, the same stories run through their other channels, so staff keep hearing them: recorded interviews with innovators, an all-staff innovation event, board presentations, road shows, and a quarterly newsletter.

Most innovation teams spend effort telling the market their story. The ones that get funded internally tell it to their own organization first.

A London food-ingredients company had done everything an innovation playbook asks for. The program was still crawling. Every new sprint took weeks to staff, and the energy never showed up — no matter how many boxes got checked.

In a workshop where they mapped their progress, their coach Tendayi Viki discovered what was off. The team was doing the work but wasn’t telling the story of the success they were having. There wasn’t a lot of momentum.

Tendayi developed a flywheel model to show how momentum in fact compounds. It starts with consistent action, which leads to visible results, which leads to growing engagement, translated into getting more people to join the movement. And that requires storytelling, as without it, the wins stay invisible, and the program keeps dragging.

Getting a program moving again means three things: finding the wins already there, telling them as stories, and backing the colleagues who step forward.

The flywheel model describes how momentum builds in an innovation program:

Storytelling sits between visible results and growing engagement. Results on their own do not pull anyone in; the story of those results is what converts them into engagement.

Most importantly, this is where buy-in comes from. People commit to a story long before they commit to a dashboard, because a well-told win gives them a reason to care and a place to picture themselves, something that a results slide can’t achieve on its own. That is the difference between a program people only acknowledge, and one they truly want to join.

Three moves turn a program's results into momentum through storytelling:

For most innovation programs, the wins already exist; what is missing is anyone telling their story. They are sitting in places nobody thinks to look: a product that shipped, a team that cleared a blocker after months, a skeptical stakeholder who came around. A program usually logs these as status updates and moves on, and this is exactly why the wins never turn into momentum.

The audit below is a quick self-check: four questions, one per stage of the flywheel. Wherever the answer is no, that stage has stalled.

The London program answered no at the second question, despite a launched product, trained coaches, and a full innovation board. The results were real, but nobody outside the team could see them. That is the gap the next move closes.

Most innovation teams' instinct is to make a win visible with data: sprint counts, adoption figures, a metrics slide. Tendayi's rule is to lead with the narrative instead. A story resonates where numbers don't, and people tend to join a story before they act on any statistic.

What makes a story land is recognition: it earns buy-in when the audience sees itself in it. This taps into a well-replicated finding in psychology, the mere-exposure effect: people prefer what they encounter repeatedly and recognize.

Five techniques build that recognition into an innovation story:

Together, the five techniques turn a flat results update into a story people want to join.

When a story ends with an invitation, some colleagues respond and ask how to get involved, while others stay put. The momentum comes from those who respond.

The final move is to track who reacts to each story and put time into the colleagues already volunteering, instead of spreading effort evenly across people who are not interested. Those volunteers do the next round of work, which produces the next result, which brings in the next group of people.

As Tendayi puts it, transformation should not require begging, pleading, or coercing anyone. That level of effort is the signal a program is pushing when it could be pulling. The innovation leader's job is to keep the wheel turning by telling the story well enough that people want to push it themselves.

That’s it for today.

See you back in August!

Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Chief @ Innov8rs