Corporate Entrepreneurship Part 3 — Knowing when to push forward and when to stop

When a business has already invested time, money, and people into a new initiative, there is enormous pressure to keep going — not because the initiative is working, but because stopping feels like admitting the investment was wasted. This is called the sunk cost fallacy, and it causes organisations to throw good money after bad every single day.

The only question that should determine whether to continue an initiative is: given what we know now, does the future potential of this idea justify continued investment? The money already spent is gone regardless of what you decide. It should not be the reason you continue.

The best way to avoid the sunk cost trap is to define your decision points before you start. At the beginning of any new initiative, decide: what would we expect to see at 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days if this is working? And if we do not see those things, what does that mean?

When you have agreed on these markers in advance — before anyone is emotionally invested in the outcome — it is much easier to make clear-headed decisions when the time comes. The evidence either meets the threshold or it does not. The decision is mostly already made.

Not every innovation needs to become a major new product line to be considered successful. Some of the most valuable innovations in a business are process improvements — ways of doing existing work faster, cheaper, or with fewer errors. Others are small product tweaks that meaningfully improve the customer experience.

Define success broadly. If an experiment taught you something genuinely useful — even if the idea itself did not work — that has value. A culture that only celebrates wins will eventually stop experimenting. A culture that celebrates learning will keep getting better.

When something does work, the challenge shifts from "should we continue?" to "how do we grow this?" This is where many corporate innovation efforts stumble. The skills and culture that allow experimentation are different from the skills and culture needed to scale reliably.

As you scale a successful innovation, bring in the systems, processes, and people who are good at execution rather than invention. Give the original team credit and involve them — but recognise that a different set of strengths is now needed to take the idea to its full potential.