Innovation discipline usually gets talked about in food-and-beverage terms: shelf space, flavor trends, SKU counts. But the same struggle turns up far from any grocery aisle. Walk into a specialty chemicals lab or a bank’s product team, and you’ll hit the identical wall: too many ideas, and not enough process to tell which ones actually deserve the budget.
Chemicals: Same Budget Squeeze, Bigger Molecules
Chemical companies have spent roughly 2.5% of revenue on R&D over the past 15 years, according to EY, a number that has barely moved even as the pressure on that money has grown. Regulation is tightening, customers want lower-carbon materials, and one mid-size producer told EY it is aiming for 70% of its new products to carry a measurably positive sustainability impact within five years. That is not a target you hit by chance. It is a target you hit by tracking, at every stage, whether a formulation is actually moving toward that goal or just moving toward launch.
The parallel to CPG is almost exact. A chemicals R&D team deciding whether to keep funding a new polymer faces the same question a snack brand faces over a new flavor: is this still worth the resources, or are we carrying it forward out of habit?
Banking: When the Product Is Invisible
Financial services looks like the odd one out; no physical shelf, no formulation. But the underlying problem is identical. One major bank, in a widely cited EY case study, used to need a full weekend to rebuild its app just to ship a small feature update. After rebuilding its process around smaller, modular releases, that same update went out in about five minutes. Nothing about the bank’s ideas changed. What changed was the discipline behind moving them from concept to customer.
That is the part that is easy to miss: a slow, unclear process doesn’t just delay a product. It quietly kills good ideas that never get the chance to prove themselves, whether the product is a new drink, a new coating, or a new savings account.
One Discipline, Many Shelves
The details differ by industry. A chemicals team worries about regulatory approval and feedstock sourcing. A bank worries about compliance and system architecture. A food brand worries about taste and shelf life. But the discipline underneath, deciding what to fund, how fast to move, and how to know it’s working, is the same regardless of what’s being built.
That is really the point of building process infrastructure instead of industry-specific workarounds. Innovation Cloud works with organizations across beverage, chemicals, and financial services for exactly that reason. The shelf changes. The discipline doesn’t.
Schedule a demo to see how it works across industries.
