Why the incentives produce this pattern reliably
If an innovation team's success metric is "pilots launched" or "pilots judged successful", that's precisely what they'll optimise for — and scaling is a different, harder, and often unrewarded job that belongs to a different part of the organisation with its own, unrelated priorities.
This is the same handoff gap covered in our AI practice's look at why enterprise pilots stall — here it's a strategic and incentive-design problem rather than a purely technical one.
What breaks the pattern
Making "successfully scaled to production" part of the innovation function's actual success metric, not "pilots launched", and funding the scaling phase explicitly as its own budget line rather than assuming it happens naturally once a pilot looks good, realigns the incentive with the outcome the organisation actually wants.
If your innovation team is measured on pilots launched, you'll get a lot of pilots launched. Scaling was never what they were being measured on.MNB Strategy Practice
Key actions
- Measure the innovation function on scaled outcomes, not pilots launched
- Fund the scaling phase as its own explicit budget line
- Plan the handoff to an owning team before the pilot starts
- Audit the pilot-to-scale ratio honestly, not just pilot success rate