How disciplined innovation and problem-solving can unlock untapped growth
Don’t underestimate the growth already inside their own walls. Instead unlock new revenue and cost savings with a system that engages people, manages risk, and turns ideas into measurable business results.
1. Engage More Workers in Proactive Problem Solving
When more employees actively participate in solving problems, companies see two major benefits:
- Valuable process improvements that reduce costs and increase efficiency
- Higher employee engagement, creating a culture of continuous improvement
The smallest project sometimes referred to as “Just Do It” or “Stop the Stupid” often have obvious returns with little downside. And because they are low risk they often don’t get officially tracked to report out value. But we do have data from training courses, because students apply what they learn to real work and document the value. In a small sample of seven students completing Fundamentals Training, the mean project value was $765,733 with a large standard deviation of $1,693,118. Obviously the project values are going to have a large variance due to all the possible projects people can invent along with the various industries and the company sizes, but the point is that as companies enable more innovation in how they work, the value adds up.
2. Focus on Disruptive Innovation for Growth
Disruptive innovation is where organizations generate new products or services that contribute 30–50% of revenue. Incremental improvements and “following the market” are important, but without a healthy focus on truly disruptive ideas, growth stagnates.
The key is leveraging new technology to invent ideas and disciplined experimentation. Take Brain Brew Custom Whiskey as an example: by controlling the wood–bourbon interaction to reduce variance by 99.5%, the team created a new business with award-winning products. This was all enabled by a structured, data-driven system, not customer insights or market trends.
Best practice: invest at least twice as much focus on disruptive and proactive projects as on incremental “idea follower” projects. This ensures you’re capturing the high-value opportunities that drive real growth.
3. Make the Funnel Wide Early (10x current sales), But Narrow Faster
Failing late in development or in the marketplace is expensive. The solution is to screen ideas aggressively early in the process and only invest in the most promising opportunities. A wide funnel at the start ensures you capture a diversity of ideas, but the ability to quickly filter and pivot is what maximizes ROI.
Data from large B2B companies shows typical idea screening passes ~65% of ideas, but our system reduces this to ~29%, saving millions in development costs while increasing the success rate of final commercialization. Smart early filtering lets your organization invest in the right ideas at the right time.
Across these three areas—employee-driven problem solving, disruptive innovation, and disciplined idea screening—the common thread is measurable impact. When organizations engage more people in solving problems, focus resources on meaningful new opportunities, and evaluate ideas early with data, the results accumulate quickly. Individual projects may range widely in value, but the combined effect across hundreds of initiatives can dramatically improve growth, efficiency, and competitiveness.
The organizations that succeed treat innovation and improvement as managed systems rather than occasional creative efforts. They widen the funnel of possibilities, learn quickly, and invest only in the opportunities that demonstrate real potential. Over time, this disciplined approach turns everyday ideas, experiments, and projects into significant economic value across the enterprise.