There's a disconnect that's quietly holding your innovation program back — even when everything looks fine.

HP spent around $4 billion annually on central R&D, among the highest budgets in the world at the time. More than 75% of what those labs handed to the business units was stopped within six months.

Billions invested. Most of it died.

The science was not weak. The ideas were groundbreaking. But the young businesses that were coming out of those labs had no way of maturing in the business units that were supposed to absorb them.

The most expensive capability in the company was returning a fraction of what it cost, but the missing piece that fixed it cost a fraction of the R&D it was wasting: a greenhouse.

Paul Campbell, who led innovation at HP, Philips, Schneider Electric, and Gore, converted a struggling capability into a three-time unicorn powerhouse. He didn't build that greenhouse out of the blue. He started with the question that matters most: whether the capabilities work as a chain, and which gap is grinding every investment-worthy project to a halt.

The finding? It's rarely the expensive part that's broken. The big investments are visible, they have champions, they get funded first. The thing actually breaking the chain is usually smaller and less glamorous, sitting right next to them, invisible because everything around it looks healthy.

The highest-return move, then, is usually a small fix that lets those costly parts finally pay out.

For Paul, finding that fix takes three tools working together — a canvas to show where the chain breaks, a scorecard to tell you which gap is costing you most, and a way to separate the policies that look immovable from the ones you can actually change.

Most innovation leaders are getting advice calibrated to a company that isn't theirs.

For years, Paul ran an innovation executive forum in Silicon Valley. Corporate leaders would fly in for immersion weeks, visiting startups, attending talks, meeting venture capitalists. At the end of each week, Paul asked the same question.

What advice did you hear this week that directly contradicted other advice you received?

The dynamic was always the same. One expert said the first thing to do is open a venturing office in Silicon Valley. The next expert said that was the worst possible move. One advisor recommended building an internal accelerator. Another said accelerators were a waste of resources without the underlying culture to support them.

Both recommendations make sense, but there is a caveat: each one assumes a different starting point. The advisor who recommended venturing was picturing a company that already had all capabilities functioning in harmony: lean innovation practices, a protected space to incubate early-stage work, business model fluency, and, just as importantly, finance, procurement, and HR set up to operate on a venture's timeline rather than the core business's.

The one who warned against it was picturing a company with none of that, where a venturing office would stall the first time it hit a budget cycle or a vendor-onboarding rule built for a different kind of business.

The executives sitting in the room that day had no way to tell which advice applied to them, because they didn't have a clear picture of what their own innovation infrastructure actually looked like. None of them could say where their company's chain actually broke.

These recurring conversations led to a canvas at the heart of Paul's recently published book, The Corporate Innovator's Playbook. It gives an innovation leader the single picture those forum executives never had: the whole program laid out as 10 areas across three layers.

At the top the layer that sets direction:

In the middle, the working methods:

At the bottom, the foundation everything rests on:

The canvas maps the 10 areas. The scorecard rates each one and measures it against a database of other corporate innovation programs. That comparison is what makes a score useful: it shows where a program stands against comparable companies, and which gaps are costing it the most.

Each area can have three possible scores: the maximum, a middle mark, or zero. The exact numbers differ by area.

The scoring falls into three tiers:

The total possible score is 60, but the number means different things depending on each program's age. The score is benchmarked against three program-age bands (under 2 years, 2 to 5 years, and 5+ years), each with its own thresholds for "needs improvement," "OK," and "excellent."

The canvas and the accompanying score helps to see the gap. Closing the gap inside a $120 billion company, against budgets and business units that were never built for it, is what Paul did at HP.

A program can look healthy on every line item and still be returning a fraction of what it costs.

When Paul was asked to lead innovation at HP roughly 20 years ago, the program seemed in great shape. HP was a $120 billion business spending approximately $4 billion a year on central R&D. Design thinking, lean, business model innovation: these were all well established.

75% of R&D projects transferred to business units were killed within six months. Business unit leaders were growing their core businesses and had no appetite for ventures that would dilute margins. Their message to the innovation team was direct: "get the business to the point where it is generating revenue and profit, then transfer it."

The most expensive capability in the company, billions a year of R&D, was returning almost nothing. The labs kept producing; the output kept dying on arrival.

When Paul assessed all components of the program, he concluded that what was actually missing was a protected space where a young business can mature until it reaches accretive revenue.

Acting on that reading, Paul set up a greenhouse, to incubate technologies and early-stage businesses coming out of HP Labs, until it reached accretive revenue before transferring it to a business unit. The gaming business was its largest success: gaming PCs, workstations for graphics design, and servers for streaming games, all built from HP Labs technology.

Over time, it produced three unicorns. The overall success rate for R&D transfers flipped from under 25% to over 75%. Paul has used the greenhouse model at every company since.

Nothing changed about the R&D spend. The same billions, which finally connected to a cheap greenhouse that could grow what the labs produced, went from dying on transfer to producing unicorns.

Some fixes are harder to spot than the greenhouse. They don't show up as a missing part at all, because they live in the part of the company that doesn't think of itself as part of innovation: the operating policies of finance, procurement, and HR.

On the scorecard these sit under culture practices, one of the three highest-weighted areas. With these, Paul kept hitting the same wall: how do you find a cheap fix for something so deeply ingrained in the organization's roots?

Every innovation leader who has taken a proposal to finance knows that wall.

The pattern goes like this. An innovation team develops a new concept that requires a different supply chain model. They take the proposal to procurement. Procurement says no.

The team takes a partnership proposal to HR. HR says no.

They bring a new funding structure to finance. Finance says no.

And each time, the innovation leader walks away feeling like they just lost an argument with the company's identity.

The distinction that breaks the deadlock separates two layers of corporate culture that look alike from the outside but operate very differently once you pull them apart.

Principles are the core values that define what the company stands for: "Do no harm." "Act with integrity." "Protect the customer." These are real commitments, and they should not change. An innovation leader who picks a fight with core principles is picking the wrong fight.

Practices are the operational policies that govern how the company works day to day:

What happens, repeatedly, is that practices get dressed up as principles.

When an innovation team asks finance to accommodate a different funding model, the pushback sounds like a values statement: "We have a responsibility to our shareholders."

When the team asks HR for a rotation policy, the response invokes employee welfare: "We don't treat our people like that."

The specific, changeable practice (a depreciation rule, a vendor onboarding timeline) hides behind a principle that feels immovable. And the innovation team retreats, because who wants to argue against employee welfare or shareholder responsibility?

Paul calls the process of pulling these apart "deconstruction."

An HR rotation policy that lets employees spend six months on an innovation project and return to their core role doesn't threaten employee welfare; it expands the development opportunities the company can offer.

A funding model that allocates a separate budget line for early-stage ventures doesn't undermine fiduciary responsibility; it creates a transparent structure for managing innovation risk.

A procurement process with a faster evaluation track for projects under a certain threshold doesn't compromise supply chain integrity; it prevents a 14-week approval cycle from killing a partnership that needs to move in 3.

Once the specific practice is identified and separated from the principle, the innovation leader is no longer asking finance to abandon its values. The leader is asking finance to update one specific policy that was designed for the core business and doesn't fit the operating rhythm of early-stage innovation. That's a negotiation most support functions can engage with.

The canvas shows where the chain breaks. But when the break is a culture practice (a policy buried in finance, HR, or procurement), finding the fix takes an extra step.

Paul formalizes it into a four-step integration plan:

Setting up the HP greenhouse that turned dead R&D into unicorns created a new pressure point. A venture growing inside it needed funding on its own schedule, and the canvas located that break under culture practices, in finance.

Typically, a venture growing inside the greenhouse might need additional funding at three months, six months, or two years; the timing depends on how fast the business grows. The annual budget cycle couldn't accommodate that. Putting a venture on hold for six to nine months while waiting for the next cycle can kill the opportunity.

When Paul's team asked finance to set aside funds for the greenhouse, the response was familiar: "We don't do set-asides. That's not how we do things around here." The principle underneath that response was fiduciary responsibility: the company would not manipulate its finances for short-term gains. The practice wrapped inside it was the annual budget cycle itself, which treated all spending requests identically, whether the business was a mature product line or a three-month-old venture.

With the practice pulled out from the principle, Paul could design the fix: the ATM funding model. Finance would reserve funds for the innovation team using whatever mechanism finance preferred. The innovation team would provide six months' notice on whether they intended to draw on the funds. If the team did not need the money, the funds went back to finance for reallocation elsewhere.

Both sides needed maturity to make the model work: finance had to be willing to reserve, and the innovation team had to be willing to return unused funds rather than spending them to protect the budget line.

The ATM model had never been done before at HP. Once in place, the greenhouse fueled growth at the pace businesses needed rather than the pace the budget cycle allowed.

At Schneider Electric, the canvas pointed to culture practices again, the same area as the HP funding break, but this time the blocker was a different policy: how the company allocated upfront R&D costs to new products.

Schneider used a five-year straight-line depreciation model. Twenty percent of the upfront investment was allocated to year one regardless of how many units were sold. For a new product with low initial volume, that allocation hammered margins.

Business unit teams were compensated based on margin performance. The incentive structure turned new products into a liability. One country manager sent products back to headquarters and refused to sell them because the margin structure made the new products untenable on the country P&L.

Finance framed its resistance as a principle: "We will not manipulate our finances to generate short-term gains." Paul separated that principle (transparent, responsible financial reporting) from the practice buried inside it (straight-line depreciation applied identically to mature high-volume products and brand-new low-volume ones).

With the distinction clear, finance approved a change scoped to innovation projects only, where new products had low initial volumes: a per-unit depreciation allocation instead of straight-line. The per-unit model spread the R&D cost proportionally across the units actually sold, so margins in year one were no longer distorted by allocating 20% of upfront investment against minimal revenue.

The change transformed how business units received new technologies. Products that country managers had previously refused to sell became viable on the local P&L from launch.

In this case, no new capability was built and no product was redesigned. One depreciation rule was rewritten, and an entire pipeline of products became sellable.

The last fix is the one that looks least like a fix at all.

A team in Philips lighting in Amsterdam had built an intelligent, color-controlled LED light for the home. The one thing they couldn't do was find anyone who would pay $50 for a light bulb.

Patented. Award-winning. Finished. And about to be killed.

Weeks from being shut down, they came to Paul who was running the innovation program.

The canvas showed why in a single read. The technology scored at the top; the business model beside it scored zero. The invention was never the problem; the route to market was. Philips lighting expected to sell the light through the same mass retailers that stock ordinary bulbs, a Walmart or a Home Depot, where a $50 connected device had no shelf.

Rather than let the product die inside a lighting business with no path to sell it, Paul pulled it into central innovation, and the team contacted Apple. Apple's response was immediate: this was exactly the kind of product they wanted in their Apple Home portfolio. Apple would write the software, make it phone-compatible, and sell it in their own stores.

The product launched as Philips Hue and became the number one selling non-Apple product in Apple stores at the time. Its success helped Philips win a Fast Company Most Innovative Companies award that year.

And the fix that got it there had no budget attached to it at all: no new technology, no redesign, no spend. The product had been finished for months. The only thing that changed was the route to market, out of mass retail and toward a buyer who fit, and that one move turned a stranded design award into a category-defining business.

HP's central R&D was spending around $4 billion a year and producing science worth defending, then watching most of it die on the handoff — despite the labs working exactly as designed.

The break sat beside it, in the unglamorous thing nobody fought for: a place for young businesses to mature before transfer. Building it cost a fraction of what the labs cost. It also produced three unicorns.

Schneider Electric had the same shape of problem in a depreciation rule. Philips had it in a sales channel that left an award-winning light bulb with nowhere to sell. In each case the fix was one small change — but the payoff was a pipeline unlocked, a product made sellable, a category created.

In each case, the program was doing the right things. The labs were producing. The products were ready. The business units were open to receiving them.

The break was in between. And because every part looked fine on its own, nobody was looking there. It's not in the parts. It's in what connects them.

Paul Campbell and Steffen Bartschat's new book, The Corporate Innovator's Playbook, covers the full framework and scorecard detail. It's available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Mariano Maluf on the sponsorship spine — and why without it, even validated ventures stall.

Kimberly-Clark had 40,000 employees, billions in annual revenue, and brands that consumers in over 175 countries reached for without second thought. Its teams were already running design thinking, rapid prototyping, and consumer research.

Despite the global success, nobody inside the organization had diagnosed how those parts fit together. Mariano Maluf did, and the gaps he found were hiding in plain sight: compensation structures, budget allocations, and ownership rules that worked perfectly for the core business, but had never been designed to carry innovation output into the market.

The company brought him in to lead its global innovation function, with a mandate to help brands like Huggies, Kotex, and Kleenex build deeper digital relationships with consumers. His first question upon entering the building wasn't what to start building. It was whether the organization could absorb what it already knew how to build.

Mariano started quietly; one conversation at a time, behind closed doors, asking regional CIOs and brand leaders: "How can I help you be better at what you do?" Before committing to any direction, he posed a question to himself and his leadership team: “Why is this company doing innovation at all? Who is it for, and how ready is the organization to support it?”

The answer he repeatedly got — "help brand owners use emerging technology to get closer to consumers”. Guided by these conversations, Mariano went on to build the innovation function.

He started by mapping the full chain of people who would need to say yes for any innovation product to survive: the business unit leader who would co-fund development, the team that would own the product after launch, the executive whose support would keep the budget alive past the first year.

Mariano calls that chain a "sponsorship spine." Without one, a validated concept has no path into the organization, no matter how strong the idea behind it.

But a spine built on relationships alone was doomed to fail. One departure at the top could collapse the entire chain. So Mariano built a structure around the spine. He created three programs (culture of innovation, partner ecosystem, and digital output), each measured against what the business already cared about. He set up a co-investment model: if the innovation team was building something for Kleenex, the Kleenex business unit put budget in alongside them. And after handoff, the product's performance would count on the business unit's own scorecard, not just the innovation team's.

Then, came the first real test from Kleenex in the UK. Would this structure hold?

The brand's digital platform had almost no traffic. Working with the brand owners, Mariano's team identified an opportunity around allergy management: millions were suffering from severe allergies. Kleenex, beyond selling tissue, had no role in helping them manage these allergies.

That’s when his team rolled their sleeves up. They tested demand with a prototype technique where the product doesn't actually exist yet. One team member sat on a call with a potential consumer, asking about allergy triggers and daily routines. On the other end of the line, the rest of the team were furiously assembling a personalized allergy recommendation by hand, in real time, as if an automated engine already existed. They found out, very quickly, whether anyone would engage, before spending a single dollar on development.

And people did.

The concept became Pollen Pal, a mobile tool that helped allergy sufferers navigate daily exposure. Within weeks, traffic to the Kleenex platform increased nearly 4x, without paid advertising. Pollen Pal scaled to multiple markets, captured tens of thousands of first-party data records, and projected $1.1 million in net sales value from its first iteration.

Pollen Pal survived because every connection was in place before the product existed. The Kleenex brand team had co-invested in development, so they had skin in the game from the start. Their scorecard already included Pollen Pal's performance, so absorbing the product after handoff advanced their own targets.

But not every product had that infrastructure underneath it.

Across the same period, Mariano and his team had spent months building a venture in adult care: conversational AI and messaging tools for caregivers and care receivers. They had validated consumer insights, a working prototype, and a sponsorship spine all the way up to the division president. The CEO himself had personally expressed interest. "I'd love to be in the beta program," he told the team.

Then, the division president left the company.

The top of the sponsorship spine disappeared. For months, the team watched the project sit idle while they searched for a new sponsor willing to carry the work forward. Recovery meant stopping the project entirely.

But the data was never the problem. The problem was that nobody in the core business had been structurally committed to the venture.

No business unit had co-invested. No one's scorecard included the venture's performance. No team had been assigned to own the product after launch.

Mariano saw the same pattern play out on a FEM care venture where the team had done all the design work and run successful experiments, only to hear, at the moment of handoff: "I don't have anyone to handle that after we launch. That's not part of my incentive. I cannot devote dollars to this, because I have to promote a physical product. That's what I'm measured on."

The sponsorship spine had looked solid, but the co-investment, the shared scorecard, the post-launch ownership that had carried Pollen Pal to market had never been built for the caregiver venture. Every connection ran through the division president alone. When the president walked out, there was nothing underneath to carry the weight.

Overall, the innovation team at Kimberly-Clark had the right parts in place: design thinking, consumer research, prototyping, a team that could build and validate at speed. What it hadn't built were the operational structures underneath them: the budgets, compensation, and ownership that determined whether the rest of the organization could absorb what the innovation team produced.

Where those structures existed, the product reached the market — and produced 1.1 million in net sales value from its first iteration. Where they didn't, the product never left the building.

Five innovation leaders on what actually gets the organization to move.

A venture that had cleared every test. An organization that responded with verbal support and zero structural action.

One member brought this problem to a recent Innov8rs Community roundtable. Five peers shared what actually moves it forward.

When an innovation team presents a validated concept and asks for resources to scale, the implicit message is: "this is our project, and the organization should support it." That framing places full accountability on a small team, while the core business watches from a distance.

Replacing "help us scale this" with "how do we, as a company, develop a bet that has passed initial tests but doesn't yet fit our operating logic" changes who owns the problem. The first version produces a pitch deck. The second produces a conversation about shared governance, mixed teams, and joint funding. A jointly developed innovation agenda, built through two-way dialog rather than one-way presentation, consistently outperforms a unilateral pitch.

If a business unit leader who should care about an adjacent venture is unwilling to provide access to customers, physical space, or team members for early testing, that reluctance tells the innovation leader how much the venture actually matters to the business. In their viewpoint, the venture is just another "nice-to-have", and no volume of proof points will change that.

That is why stakeholder commitment works best as a progressive test. Early on, the minimum ask is access to a specific resource: a customer list, a test location, a data set. As the concept gains traction, the ask increases to access to dedicated team members from the stakeholder's function. Approaching scale, the stakeholder shares ownership of the venture's outcomes on their own scorecard. Each stage reveals whether the commitment is deepening or stalling.

A quick check before your next pitch: List each function the venture needs. For each, note the smallest commitment that would signal genuine interest. Where the answer is blank, alignment work needs to happen before the business case gets refined further.

Mixed teams that combine innovation members with staff from the core business serve two purposes when timed correctly.

The first is functional. People from operations, sales, or finance understand the constraints and middle-management concerns that determine whether a new business can actually run inside the existing organization. The second is political. Those same people carry stakeholder relationships back into their home functions, taking over a significant portion of stakeholder management organically.

Also, timing matters more than composition. Bringing operational staff in before the concept has enough substance to warrant their attention wastes credibility; the venture looks like another innovation side project. Bringing them in after validation is complete and the team needs a handoff partner turns them into recipients rather than co-owners. The window sits in between: once desirability, feasibility, and viability checks are positive, but before the venture's operating model is locked.

Tip: Create a virtual business unit where people remain functionally aligned to their home departments but dedicate a defined portion of their time to the new venture. Keep the resource footprint low, especially during cost-cutting cycles. A separate, dedicated team gets created only when the business reaches critical size.

A large retailer sequenced its ventures in layers built from the core. The company's main business is retail and financial services. The first adjacency was standalone stores for a product category it already sold. The second wrapped warranty services around those same products. Further out, a new entity manufactured and sold the retailer's own branded products to competing retailers, a business that had not existed three years earlier.

Each move extended from the previous one in a way stakeholders could follow. The principle applies wherever the gap between the current business and the adjacent opportunity feels too wide to bridge in one move. Starting with the simplest possible product and business model, ideally without any spin-off structure, and building from there keeps the organization connected to the venture rather than watching it from a distance.

Corporate functions operate like immune systems. Any new initiative that creates work or ambiguity for existing teams triggers resistance. Pushing innovation into those functions registers as a threat.

Alternatively, align the new venture with problems those functions already have. An operations leader whose occupancy rates are under pressure has a problem that flexible, short-term retail concepts could address. A sales team struggling with retention has a problem that performance services could help solve. When the new business resolves existing pain rather than creating new demands, support functions pull the innovation toward them.

Stakeholders follow their goals, because they are rational. If the adjacent venture does not connect to something a stakeholder is already measured on, verbal support will always be the ceiling. KPIs expressed in the business terms a stakeholder already tracks, not specifically innovation metrics, are what will ultimately convert interest into action.

That’s it for today.

Next week: what happens to innovation skills when the innovation title disappears. We collected stories from corporate innovators who transitioned out of dedicated innovation roles — and kept finding ways to use everything it taught them.

Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Chief @ Innov8rs

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