Key takeaway: The pilot that converts into a contract is not designed to prove the technology works. It is designed to arm the internal champion with the evidence the organisation's governance process requires to say yes. Three criteria separate pilots that convert from pilots that demonstrate: representativeness, boundedness, and learnability.

TLDR;-) Large organisations don't resist innovation because they're broken. They resist it because they're working. Four mechanisms do the killing: procedural resistance, resource competing, standard dilution, passive waiting. Each is a legitimate organisational function operating in the wrong context. If the immune response is firing, you're probably working on the wrong layer.

Eighty-three per cent of companies rank innovation as a top-three priority. Three per cent are ready to act on it. That is not a typo. BCG's 2024 Most Innovative Companies report calls what remains "zombie innovation systems": organisations going through the motions of innovation without strategic commitment, waiting for certainty that will never arrive.