Business Core · Innovation · Module
Scaling or stopping
The two ends of the route: moving a proven pilot into ordinary operation, or ending a project cleanly and releasing what it held.
The idea
How it works
A pilot runs under unusual conditions: motivated founders, hand-picked customers, forgiven costs. Scaling means checking which of those conditions the result depended on and designing the operational version for ordinary ones. O’Reilly and Tushman describe the underlying tension as ambidexterity — exploring and exploiting inside one organisation — and the handover is where the two meet.
Stopping is the other valid end. Staw’s work on escalation of commitment shows how readily people continue because of what has already been spent. A clean stop records what was learned, releases people and budget on a date, and is announced plainly enough that the work does not quietly continue. Once scaled, the processes belong to Operational Systems, and any defined roll-out is run under Project management.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Name what the pilot depended on
List the conditions that will not hold at scale, and test the result without them where possible.
- 02
Appoint the operating owner before handover
Someone who will run it next year, who is not necessarily the person who invented it.
- 03
Set a stop date as well as a stop criterion
A decision to stop with no date leaves the work running on goodwill.
- 04
Announce the stops
Saying openly that a project has ended, and what it taught, makes stopping ordinary and frees the people for other work.
One level in
The components of scaling or stopping
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Scale-up readiness check
Whether the pilot’s result survives ordinary conditions, and whether the economics hold at volume.
LearnOperational handover
The transfer from the founding team to the people who will run it, with what moves and when.
Learn
Money already spent is not a reason to continue. Ask whether you would start the project today, knowing what you now know.
The other modules in innovation
Sources of ideas
Where new ideas come from and how they reach someone who can act on them. Making the routes deliberate does more than asking for more ideas.
LearnExperiments
Breaking an idea into the assumptions it rests on and testing the riskiest one first, with the smallest test that could change the decision.
LearnPipeline and gates
The stages an idea passes through, the gates between them, and the criteria each must meet — agreed before the gate, including what would stop it.
Learn