If you’ve ever watched a pilot with real potential fade out slowly, you’re not alone. A team rallies around a smart idea, builds an early prototype, gets encouraging feedback — and then momentum disappears. Other priorities win. Budgets shift. The spark fizzles.
We see this pattern across countless service and product innovation efforts.
Ideas rarely fail because they’re weak. More often, they fail because there isn’t a reliable way to move them through the organization: no clarity about what comes next, who owns the work, or how success will be measured.
The organizations that consistently innovate don’t rely on inspiration alone. They create the conditions for ideas to advance: enough flexibility to explore, and enough discipline to make decisions that carry them forward.
At Propeller, we call this balance structured creativity. It’s what transforms bold ideas into measurable business outcomes.
Before looking at what high-performing organizations do differently, it’s worth examining the friction points that most often slow innovation down.
# Why Innovation Efforts Stall
Even the most forward-thinking organizations hit similar barriers. In our work, the same friction points tend to surface again and again — regardless of industry or size.
- Endless pilots. Proofs of concept multiply without clear decision gates or success metrics. Teams launch new experiments before finishing old ones, and the portfolio becomes a graveyard of half-tested ideas.
- Unclear ownership. Innovation sits everywhere (and nowhere) on the org chart. Without defined roles, ideas drift between teams or lose urgency as priorities shift.
- Weak connection to business value. Teams can’t show or articulate how their ideas connect to revenue, efficiency, or customer outcomes. When budget season arrives, innovation becomes the easiest line item to cut.
None of these challenges is a fatal flaw, but they do create drag. Over time, they erode confidence, making it harder for leaders to fund new ideas and teams to rally behind them. Without clear roles, metrics, and decision gates, innovation becomes a collection of experiments instead of a strategic engine for growth.
# What High-Performing Organizations Do Differently
The organizations that consistently succeed with service and product innovation aren’t relying on luck or exceptional ideas. They build the structures and behaviors that give promising concepts a predictable path from exploration to impact.
# 1. They Treat Innovation as a Disciplined Operating Cycle
Leading organizations approach innovation the same way they approach operations: with process, measurement, and accountability.
They build an operating model for innovation with clear ownership, funding gates, and performance metrics that mirror other business functions. Think of it as three distinct phases:
- Discovery creates a structured space for exploring opportunities informed by data and customer insight. This is a focused exploration with clear guardrails, not a free-for-all brainstorm.
- Validation uses lightweight pilots with clear learning objectives to test feasibility and adoption. Every pilot answers specific questions, and those answers drive go/no-go decisions.
- Scaling moves from pilot to enterprise-ready. This phase sets criteria for investment and ownership, building the structure for sustainable, repeatable delivery.
By treating this cycle as a managed process rather than an unstructured exercise, leaders give innovation the same rigor they apply to budgeting or demand planning. The structure creates the right conditions for progress — space for teams to explore, and clear criteria that help leaders decide when and how to invest.
For more on how operating models break down and get rebuilt, see our article on why operating models fail.
# 2. They Balance Exploration and Execution
High-performing innovators know how to make exploration safe without derailing day-to-day operations. They don’t treat innovation as a separate department. Instead, they build guardrails and governance that let creativity thrive within clear boundaries.
They define which projects are exploratory versus operational, set decision rights for each, and use portfolio reviews to assess risk and reward across both. This separation prevents innovation from either getting lost in bureaucracy or running unchecked.
Here’s what that looks like in practice: With Propeller’s support, a high-growth global manufacturer launched an innovation lab and venture board model to move ideas from exploration to market delivery. In its first year, the company advanced a dozen pilot concepts and commercialized three, two of which contributed nearly 10% of the following year’s revenue.
The structure enabled faster, data-backed decisions, clearer ownership, and a repeatable path from idea to impact.
# 3. They Design for Collaboration, Not Silos
Innovation doesn’t live in a single department. It’s built on cross-functional collaboration, where customer insight, technical feasibility, and business strategy intersect.
High-performing organizations intentionally connect these functions through shared tools, rituals, and feedback loops. They break down the “handoff” mentality between research, design, and execution, replacing it with a continuous dialogue.
One manufacturing client faced this exact challenge. They had all the right ingredients: marketing was tracking industry trends, sales was hearing constant feedback from customers, and engineering was focused on product improvements. But none of those insights ever met in one place. The organization was drowning in information but starving for integration.
Propeller helped design a new product development process, a continuous feedback loop connecting market insights, customer input, and design feasibility into one workflow. Now, with shared collaboration tools and regular cross-functional reviews in place, the company has accelerated product development and reduced time-to-market more than twofold.
The biggest change wasn’t structural; it was cultural. Teams began to see innovation as a shared responsibility, not a competing priority.
We explore this challenge more broadly in our piece on organizational misalignment.
# 4. They Know When to Stop, or Pivot
Not every idea deserves to scale. Yet many organizations struggle to let go of projects that no longer deliver value. These “zombie pilots” quietly consume resources and stall progress, kept alive by sunk cost fallacy or internal political pressure.
High-performing innovators set clear exit criteria — ROI thresholds, adoption milestones, or timeline limits — to decide when to pivot or stop. They view every initiative as a learning opportunity, not a personal investment.
The data backs this up: industry research shows that fewer than one in four pilots ever make it to production. The differentiator for high-performing organizations isn’t necessarily fewer failures, but instead faster learning cycles that redirect energy toward what works.
# Building Momentum for the Long Term
Once innovation gains traction, the challenge becomes maintaining velocity. Many organizations can spark creativity, but sustaining it requires structure that outlasts individual projects or champions.
High-performing innovators build mechanisms that keep momentum alive:
- Iteration: They turn every pilot into a feedback loop. Each initiative (successful or not) feeds insights into future priorities, improving how ideas are tested, funded, and scaled.
- Cross-functional alignment: They ensure innovation isn’t owned by one department but orchestrated across them. Clear communication channels and shared metrics keep teams moving in the same direction.
- Dedicated structures: They create permanent roles or functions, such as a PMO, innovation council, or dedicated innovation leader, to manage this rhythm and maintain accountability over time. For many, a consulting partner provides the additional perspective and capacity needed to sustain the pace.
For a deeper look at how PMOs support strategic execution, read our perspective on PMO misconceptions.
This combination of iteration, alignment, and ownership transforms innovation from a series of projects into a continuous capability. It’s how creativity becomes a consistent part of how the organization operates, not an occasional burst of energy that fades.
Propeller helps organizations establish these structures and rhythms so innovation keeps its speed, direction, and measurable impact long after the first success.
# Where Does Your Innovation Program Stand?
The gap between organizations that innovate successfully and those cycling through endless pilots comes down to systems, not ideas. If you're wondering where your innovation program stands, three questions can tell you everything you need to know:
Three Questions to Assess Your Innovation Maturity
- Can you measure innovation outcomes the same way you measure operations?
- Do you have clear decision gates for funding, scaling, or stopping pilots?
- Is accountability for innovation shared or scattered?
If your innovation efforts have stalled, or if you’re worried they might, Propeller can help you rebuild momentum through the right mix of creativity and discipline.
Because innovation doesn’t just happen—it’s designed.
