Innovation Strategy
An innovation strategy is not an R&D budget. It's the explicit decision on how much risk the company is willing to take outside its core business, and with what dedicated resources.
“An innovation evaluated with the same quarterly KPIs as the core business is already dead before it's born.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy innovation GTM must be isolated
An adjacent or disruptive innovation initiative sold by the same commercial team, with the same success criteria as the core business, gets systematically penalized: reps go back to selling what they know best and generates more predictable commissions.
Organizations that innovate successfully isolate the team, quotas, and evaluation time horizon of the initiative, explicitly accepting that the first 12-18 months will produce learning signals more than significant revenue.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: assigning the sale of an innovative product to the core business's sales team without dedicated quotas, getting marginal attention compared to the main product that generates more predictable commissions.
Second mistake: evaluating the innovation initiative after just one quarter with the same ROI criteria as the established business, killing initiatives that would have needed a longer horizon to mature.
Practical Application
A company launches a new adjacent product line, assigning it to the existing sales team without dedicated quotas: after 2 quarters it generates only €40,000 of pipeline. Creating a dedicated 3-person team with separate quotas and KPIs and an 18-month evaluation horizon, the same initiative generates €620,000 of pipeline in the following 2 quarters.