In this article
Innovation Readiness Assessment
A staff survey that shows, department by department, where work stalls.
Assess Your OrganizationKey takeaways
A successful pilot proves technical success. Scale depends on human adoption.
Pilots often succeed with extra people, budget and attention that a rollout will not have.
Agree the success criteria, the decision date and the rollout budget before the pilot starts.
Put people from the receiving team on the pilot, and test under their normal conditions.
Check the receiving team’s readiness before the handover, not after the first problems.
Why Successful Pilot Projects Do Not Scale
Definition
Pilot purgatory
The state in which a pilot project has shown good results and is neither rolled out nor stopped. The pilot is extended or left to fade, and the rest of the organization works as before.
A pilot project is meant to be the hard part. Once a new process, service or tool has worked for one team, extending it to the others looks like a matter of scheduling. In practice, many organizations find that working out how to scale a pilot project is harder than running one, and good results stay where they started.
The pattern is best documented in technology programs, where it has a name: pilot purgatory.
Over 70%
of industrial companies were still in pilot purgatory with new production technologies
26%
of companies have the capabilities to move beyond proofs of concept and generate tangible value from AI
Sources: World Economic Forum with McKinsey & Company, Fourth Industrial Revolution: Beacons of Technology and Innovation in Manufacturing, January 2019; BCG, Where’s the Value in AI?, October 2024
The problem is not limited to technology, and technology is rarely its cause. BCG’s study attributes around 70% of the challenges in AI programs to people and processes, 20% to technology and 10% to the algorithms. A new intake process or a new maintenance routine can stall in the same way. In each case the idea has been proven. What has not been tested is whether the teams that must use it every day are ready to take it on.
We call this distance the Innovation Gap: the space between an idea that works and a change that people use. A pilot measures technical success. Scale depends on human adoption. Three things open the gap, and the rest of this article takes them in turn.
1
Human Adoption vs Technical Success
The pilot shows that the idea works. It does not show that the teams outside the pilot will use it.
2
The End-of-Funnel Fallacy
A good result is treated as the finish line, so no one has planned or funded what follows.
3
Sustainability
The change holds while the project team is present, and fades after it leaves.
A Pilot Succeeds Under Conditions the Rollout Will Not Have
A pilot is usually given every chance to work. The team volunteered, a senior sponsor is watching, the project team is on hand to fix problems the same day, and extra budget covers the gaps. The rollout has none of these. A guide from the World Health Organization and ExpandNet, written for health programs and applicable elsewhere, states the problem directly: “Pilot projects often succeed because the innovation is implemented with special human, financial and technical resources that are not always available for large-scale implementation.”
Run the pilot under the conditions the rollout will meet:
Instead of
Volunteers who asked to take part
The best site or the strongest shift
The project team solving each problem
Extra budget and extra hours
Try this
A typical team, including people who doubt the change
An average site, or two sites that differ
The team’s own supervisor solving problems, with help on call
The normal budget and normal staffing
If the change needs something extra to work, such as training time or a new role, treat it as part of the change. It has to be funded in every team that receives it.
Proof of Concept vs Pilot: What Each One Proves
Many pilots stall because they were proofs of concept under another name. The difference between a proof of concept and a pilot is the question each one answers, and that decides what a good result allows you to conclude.
Proof of concept
Whether the Idea Can Work
A small, short test. Special resources are acceptable, and “no” is a useful answer.
Pilot
Whether Your People Can Run It
One team or site doing real work, with normal staffing, budget and systems.
Rollout
How It Becomes the Standard
Team by team, with training, a named owner and an end date for the old way.
The World Health Organization and ExpandNet guide describes the same two stages of testing: a proof of concept, where special inputs are allowed, and a “proof of implementation” that uses routinely available resources. A pilot that keeps the special resources of the first stage is a second proof of concept. It shows again that the idea works, and it leaves the question of scale unanswered.
From our workshops
The 2 Hour, $20 Test
A proof of concept can be very small. Take long customer wait times. The obvious move is a tool at $500 a month, with set-up fees and an adoption effort, and months before anyone knows whether it worked. A $20 live chat plugin and two hours of web traffic answer the first question the same day. That leaves the pilot for the harder question: whether your people can run the change.
In practice. Before the pilot starts, write down the question it answers. If the question is whether the idea works, the test is a proof of concept, and a pilot under normal conditions still has to follow.
No One Agreed What Comes After the Pilot Project
The end-of-funnel fallacy is the belief that the work is finished when an idea reaches the end of the funnel: approved, tested and shown to work. A pilot is often approved as an experiment, with no commitment about what a good result will lead to. When the result arrives, the budget for the year is spent, the sponsor has new priorities and no one is named to decide. The pilot is extended instead. In the same World Economic Forum report, 28% of respondents described pilots of more than two years.
Agree three things before the pilot starts:
Pilot success criteria. The measures, and the level of each one that counts as success, written down before the first result.
The decision. Who decides, and on what date, between three outcomes: roll out, change and test again, or stop.
The rollout budget. Where the money and the time will come from if the pilot succeeds.
Stopping is a valid outcome. A pilot that ends with a clear “no” has done its job. A pilot that ends with no decision becomes a zombie project: it delivers nothing, and it still takes up time in status meetings. Our guide to innovation portfolio management covers how to review projects and close the ones that have stopped moving.
The Receiving Team Was Not Part of the Pilot
The receiving team is the group that will work the new way every day after the project team has left: the operators, nurses, agents or analysts, and their supervisors. In many pilots they meet the change for the first time at the handover. They did not choose it or shape it, and it arrives on top of a full workload.
Key idea
The difference between an idea and an innovation is adoption.
This stage is easy to neglect. Next to the excitement of a new idea, the handover feels like administration, so it is left until the end. The World Health Organization and ExpandNet guide observes that people who were involved in a pilot are more likely to support scaling it up than those who had little input, and it recommends putting people from the future implementing organization on the pilot team.
Put people from the receiving team on the pilot. Let them run part of it, ask what would make it fail in their area, and act on their answers. Include their supervisors: a supervisor who helped shape the change is more likely to defend it when daily targets press.
If you don’t manage the transition, you haven’t innovated. You’ve just experimented.
Check the Receiving Team’s Readiness Before the Handover
Operational readiness is the question of whether a team can take on a change and keep it running. Most pilots ask it at the handover, when the answer can no longer change the plan. In our innovation process it is the first question: the opening stage, Qualify, asks whether the organization is ready to take an idea on, before anyone designs a solution. Readiness before action applies to a rollout in the same way: check that the team is ready, then set the date.
Receiving team readiness checklist
The team knows why the change is being made and what the pilot showed
A named owner inside the receiving team, not in the project team
Time set aside for training and for the slower first weeks
Supervisors have agreed how targets are adjusted during the switch
A named person to call when something goes wrong
A date when the old way of working ends
A team that cannot tick every line is not resisting the change. It is not ready yet, and the open lines show what to prepare.
Sustainability needs one more date. Review the change 30 days after the handover, with the receiving team, to see whether people are still working the new way and what is pulling them back.
The same question applies to the organization as a whole. The Innovation Readiness Assessment asks staff in every department about process, people, projects and performance, and gives leadership a department-by-department view of where work stalls. That view helps decide where a rollout can begin and where preparation is needed first. Our guide to innovation readiness explains the concept, and one person can take the free Innovation Readiness Snapshot for a first look.
Innovation Readiness Assessment
Measure Innovation Readiness in Every Department
Staff across every department assess process, people, projects and performance. Leadership receives a department-by-department view of where work stalls, with a prioritized 30- and 90-day action plan.
How to Scale a Pilot Project: Four Steps
Put together, the fixes form a short path from pilot to scale. This is how to scale a pilot project, or how to plan one that can be scaled:
1
Agree
Success criteria, a decision date and a rollout budget
2
Involve
People from the receiving team help run the pilot
3
Test
Under normal conditions, with routine resources
4
Hand over
Readiness checked, an owner named, the old way ended
A rollout is also done in stages: the next team, then the next site, using what each one learned. Each handover repeats the readiness check. Innovation is not only about the new. It is about the new normal, and the new normal is built at the handover, so plan it from the first day of the pilot.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is pilot purgatory?
Pilot purgatory is the state in which a pilot project has shown good results and is neither rolled out nor stopped. The pilot is extended or left to fade, and the rest of the organization continues to work as before.
What is the Innovation Gap?
The Innovation Gap is the distance between an idea that works and a change that people use. A pilot measures technical success, and scale depends on human adoption. The gap opens when a good result is treated as the finish line and no one plans how the change will be adopted and kept.
Why do successful pilot projects fail to scale?
Most pilots succeed under conditions a rollout will not have: volunteers, extra budget, a sponsor’s attention and a project team on hand. They stall when no one agreed what a good result would lead to, and when the team that must run the change every day was not involved.
How do you scale a pilot project?
Agree the success criteria, the decision date and the rollout budget before the pilot starts. Put people from the receiving team on the pilot, test under normal working conditions, and check the receiving team’s readiness before the handover.
What is the difference between a proof of concept and a pilot?
A proof of concept tests whether an idea can work at all, often with special resources. A pilot tests whether your own people can run it in normal conditions, with normal staffing, budget and systems. A pilot run with special resources is a second proof of concept.
What comes after a pilot project?
A decision, made on a date agreed in advance: roll out, change and test again, or stop. A rollout then proceeds team by team, with training, a named owner in each receiving team and an end date for the old way of working.
What are pilot success criteria?
Pilot success criteria are the measures, and the level of each one, that count as success, agreed before the pilot starts. They should cover the result itself and whether a typical team could run the change with normal resources.
About the author
Shannon Phillips
Co-Founder and Innovation Strategist
Designs structured innovation systems for enterprise organizations and helps leadership teams set priorities that reflect how the organization operates.
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