Innovation Acceleration : The Cost Nobody Talks About

💡Innovation Acceleration: The Cost Nobody Talks About

When growth slows, leaders love to say:

👉 “Let’s accelerate innovation.”

👉 “Let’s double the pipeline.”

Sounds bold. Sounds visionary.

But here’s the hard financial truth:

Developing innovation is cheap.

Launching innovation is expensive.

Scaling innovation can break your supply chain.

Supply chain often needs 18–24 months of lead time.

That means CAPEX, tooling, automation, hiring, and regulatory prep all start long before revenue shows up.

Now imagine you “double the pipeline value.”

Great headline.

But what if you later discover you can’t afford the rollout?

You just created a perfect storm:

• SC already invested in capacity

• Depreciation is locked in

• Volumes don’t materialize

• Standard cost explodes because capacity is underutilized

• Margin collapses

So the real question every CFO should asks is:

“Can we afford the pipeline we’re accelerating?”

Innovation is easy to announce.

Hard to scale.

Expensive to commercialize.

Risky to accelerate blindly.

Look at your pipeline.

Think about it.

source : Urs Wigger

#InnovationStrategy

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