The Synergies That Turn Innovation Programs into Growth Factories

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They run an open innovation program, or they practice lean, or they set up a greenhouse — but they rarely look at everything at once.

Paul Campbell, serial entrepreneur, and Steffen Bartschat, CEO of Hill88, argue that this is precisely why most innovation efforts fail to deliver at scale. Their Innovation Canvas maps the full ecosystem and reveals the blind spots that kill innovation before it ever scales.

Imagine the innovator walking in with what they believe is a transformational idea. Nevertheless, they are confronted with a CEO who sees a distraction from the core, a CFO who sees no budget and would rather redirect the resources elsewhere and a CTO who sees conflicting priorities and too many barriers to make it work.

This mismatch is where most breakthrough ideas die, and it happens because the organization was not ready to receive that idea. Closing that gap requires more than a compelling pitch.

The CEO needs to see a strategy question: how does this change where we are going, and how do we make room for it? The CFO needs to see a business model question: how do we fund and structure this so it works financially? The CTO needs to become an active barrier remover, clearing the way through HR, procurement, and supply chain before those functions kill the idea quietly. Getting all three to that place is a system, not a communication challenge.

Most companies adopt one methodology at a time. They set up an open innovation team to scout startups, or they practice lean to speed up MVPs, or they launch a greenhouse.

Paul and Steffen's Innovation Canvas is designed to fix that. Inspired by business model thinking, it forces leaders to look at the entire innovation ecosystem before optimizing any individual part of it.

Two bookends hold the canvas together. Strategy and Leadership sits at the top, defining where innovation fits and giving it permission to exist. Culture sits at the bottom, and it is the foundation everything else rests on. These are the two forces that determine whether innovation lives or dies

Paul spent years avoiding the culture question entirely. But ignoring it proved impossible. Every time innovators asked for changes to support a new initiative, the answer came back the same: we don't do things that way around here. Until that changes, the levers in the middle of the canvas cannot do their work.

Between the two bookends lie the actionable levers: Design Thinking, Lean Innovation, Business Model Innovation, Open Innovation, Venturing, Greenhouses, and Listening Posts.

The canvas does not prescribe which levers to pull, because that depends on what the organization is trying to achieve. What it insists on is that leaders look at all of them, because the most common failure mode is pulling one in isolation and wondering why nothing moves.

One lever deserves specific attention because the terminology matters. Paul and Steffen use the term “Greenhouse” deliberately. Incubator and accelerator have become overloaded, and everybody has a different definition for them. The Greenhouse metaphor is intentional. "Picture a little plant in a protected space, having all the experts giving it water exactly when it needs it so that it can grow into a big plant." It is a controlled environment designed for fragility, where conditions are optimized until the plant is strong enough to survive outside.

Paul has set up greenhouses repeatedly across multiple organizations, and the pattern is consistent. You develop ideas inside the greenhouse not just to MVP, but to first revenue and first profit. At the point where a new business is generating real revenue, around $20 million in Paul's experience, you hand it off to the core business. A $20 million growing, profitable business is something core operations are glad to take. Anything earlier and the core business sees it as a burden rather than an asset. The greenhouse exists to protect the idea until it is stable enough to survive the transfer.

When innovators go to HR, finance, or procurement asking for changes to support a new initiative, they face resistance. What Paul realized is that this resistance bundles two very different things together.

The first is principle— the core values that genuinely define what the company stands for, things like doing no harm or always doing the right thing. These do not change, and Paul is clear that innovation leaders should not try to change them. Recognizing them for what they are is not a defeat; it is a way of understanding where the real constraints actually sit.

The second is practice, and this is where the real work happens. Depreciation schedules, inventory requirements, HR policies that govern how employees can move between their core role and an innovation project — these are operational habits that have been in place long enough to feel immovable, but they are not. They can be changed.

They are not asking the organization to abandon its values. They are asking it to change how it operates, and that is a very different conversation.

Most innovation programs fail because they pull one lever in isolation. A company sets up an open innovation program to work with startups, but the program never gains traction. Why? Because open innovation requires lean innovation capabilities to move at startup speed, and business model innovation skills to actually monetize the partnerships. Without those supporting capabilities in place, the startup program never gets off the ground.

This is the core insight behind the Innovation Scorecard that Paul and Steffen developed. It rates proficiency in each box of the canvas, but the real value is seeing where the gaps are and how they compound. A company might score high on strategy but low on culture practices, which means the strategy cannot execute. Or high on design thinking but low on business model innovation, which means great ideas with no path to revenue.

The scorecard also benchmarks maturity. If your innovation effort is two to five years old, how many points do you need to feel okay versus excellent? It shifts the conversation from vague complaints about corporate being slow to specific, diagnostic assessments of which capabilities need development.

Once you understand where your system sits on the scorecard, the next question is operational: what should your innovation team actually work on? This is where the Innovation Thesis comes in. Steffen borrows the concept from venture capital firms, which define their investment scope upfront to create clarity and focus.

The corporate version works the same way. "You really do want a thesis to create a fence post, a guide post for everybody on the team to say, this is what we're going to be working on." Without it, innovation teams chase every interesting idea that crosses their desk and end up scattered.

The thesis serves two purposes. The first is focus. It tells the team what to work on and, just as importantly, what to ignore. The second is portfolio thinking. VCs expect to invest in at least 20 ideas to find winners, and they know unicorns are not created from one year to the next. Corporate innovation needs the same patience, but corporate leadership often lacks it. The thesis makes that expectation explicit upfront.

Paul anticipates the pushback: isn't this just strategy? Many corporate strategies are short-term, focused on hitting this year's numbers. Very few are longer-term with innovation embedded.

The Innovation Thesis is deliberately different. It is a longer-term declaration of how innovation secures the company's future, and it sits in the hands of the innovation leader rather than the executive team. You push it within your company, get executives to support it, and use it to define how innovation will contribute to growth.

The "fail fast" startup mentality doesn't translate to corporate environments. Steffen says: "In the corporate world, you have to do some planning first to prepare the culture for the integration."

This leads to a critical shift: the Integration Plan. The hardest part is scaling ideas, bridging the Greenhouse to core business.

This requires deconstruction—active dismantling of internal barriers. Innovation leaders must function as change agents, systematically addressing "You can't do that" objections from IT, Legal, and HR.

It's insufficient to have a CEO who simply "sponsors" innovation. For example, a CEO had to "thaw out the whole frozen middle layer of the company" through harsh conversations and active engagement.

Steffen points out a sobering reality: "That sponsor only lasts a year or two, and then you get a new sponsor." In mature innovation centers, leadership changes average five persons in five years.

This volatility causes ideas to die in middle management, where managers "wait out" the current CEO's enthusiasm. The contrast becomes stark when examining privately held companies. Steffen's research on German small-to-medium enterprises revealed that when the CEO is also the owner, innovation directives actually happen because leadership stability eliminates the waiting game.

The mandate is clear: Innovation leaders must be architects of the internal environmenτ and distinguish between principles that define the company and practices that hold it back. They must also plan for integration before beginning incubation.

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