Beyond the Pilot · 03

Twenty-two pilots that converted.
Not one was saved after it started.

We catalogued twenty-two cases where a corporate pilot became a real commercial deal. Every single one was won by a structure agreed before day one. Not one practitioner in the corpus credits mid-pilot effort with saving anything.

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Beyond the Pilot › The pre-commitment checklist
Three hard gates

If you cannot answer these three, the pilot is already in trouble

Of everything in the catalogue, three questions do the most predictive work. They are hard gates, not scoring criteria: a no on any one of them is worth more than a yes on everything else.

The gates

  1. Is there a named cost centre owner for year one, in writing? Not a sponsor, not a champion — the person whose budget the production version would come out of.
  2. Is there a charter signed before day one by all four parties? Startup, innovation team, business unit, procurement. If procurement first hears about this after the pilot succeeds, add three to six months and a material chance of nothing.
  3. Is there a single named decision owner with a date in their diary? A decision that belongs to a committee, at a meeting not yet scheduled, is not a decision anyone owns.

What the answers tend to mean

  1. All three, in writing. Converting. The pilot is a real commercial process with a real buyer.
  2. Two of three. Recoverable — but only if the third is fixed now, before the pilot starts. It does not get easier later.
  3. One of three. Pilot purgatory. Work will happen, a report will be written, and nothing will be bought.
  4. None. Industrial tourism. Everybody learns something; nobody transacts. Sometimes that is genuinely the goal — but then call it that, and do not staff it like a sales process.

Calibration caveat, stated plainly: this framework was built from the observed pattern set, not validated against a held-out sample of outcomes. It predicts by construction. Use it as a structured way to ask better questions before signing, not as a scoring model.

The mechanisms that recurred

What the twenty-two saves actually had in common

Corporate side

  1. Name the scale owner before the pilot starts. The strongest single item in the corpus — stated in near-identical terms by three independent sources.
  2. Attach a conditional year-one production budget at pilot approval. Contingent on the agreed criteria. Costs nothing if the pilot fails; turns the scale decision from a request into a release.
  3. Split the pilot budget with the business unit. Skin in the game from the outset rather than a handover at the end.
  4. Build the procurement fast lane before any pilot exists. A standing lane, not per-deal heroics.
  5. Run business pull, not startup push. Start from a business unit’s stated problem, not from an interesting company.
  6. One business-impact KPI, baselined against last year’s actuals, signed by everyone who will later sign the contract.
  7. Decide opex or capex classification early, not at the scale decision when it becomes a reason to delay.
  8. Give a quick no. A fast no is a gift; a slow maybe is the most expensive thing a corporate does to a startup.

Startup side

  1. Refuse to start without a signed charter. The most commercially important no a founder can say.
  2. Ask which cost centre pays, and who signs. Vagueness here means the deal is not real yet, however warm the room felt.
  3. Insist on a paid pilot at a price that requires a purchase order. The PO is the qualification event.
  4. Get a stop criterion as well as a go criterion. A pilot that cannot fail cannot succeed either.
  5. Multi-thread to 3+ people across 2+ functions, at least one above your champion, before the pilot ends.
  6. Reference-check the corporate. Ask to speak to a startup they scaled. No references, no deal.
  7. Have security and compliance artefacts ready in advance, not triggered by the deal.
  8. Work backwards from the budget cycle. For a January fiscal year, the conversation opens in September.
Beyond the Pilot

Read the rest of the research

15× What pilot conversion rates actually say Published rates run from 6% to 90%. Sorted by one variable, the contradiction disappears. Read → 60–80% Why corporate pilots fail Not during execution. At the scale decision, where almost nobody is staffed. Read → 4 Corporate innovation statistics, checked The numbers worth citing — and four of the most-quoted that do not survive a source check. Read → 7.3 Corporate–startup partnerships in APAC Months to contract, by the corporate’s count. The startup counts 8.7. That gap is the story. Read →

Working on corporate–startup innovation?
I’d like to hear about it.

Whether you’re a corporate with a pilot that needs a path to a P&L, or a startup trying to get one over the line — this is the problem I work on. I’ve led three corporate spin-outs through exactly this transition, and I sit on both sides of the table across eleven APAC markets.

If you’re building partnerships between corporates and startups, reach out. Happy to compare notes even if there’s nothing to sell.

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Related: Why pilots fail →  ·  Corporate venture building →