Eight enthusiastic employees are not an order.

A few years ago I sat in an innovation workshop at a large corporation. Eight people from different departments. All interested, attentive, with good ideas. At the end of the day there were six use cases on paper and a feeling you only get in such rooms: that something was now happening.

Nothing happened.

Not because the people had been dishonest. They were genuinely interested. They simply had no budget, no decision authority, and no pressure to convert what was discussed into a contract. The people with signing authority weren't in the room. Nobody had a number on a goal sheet on Monday morning that had anything to do with our product.

This experience costs mid-size firms in Switzerland and Germany millions every year, because plans get built on interest rather than commitment without it being noticed.

Interest and commitment are different data points

Interest is free. It's the reaction of someone who is fundamentally open. It shows in a polite yes to a workshop, in praise at the end of a presentation, in a LinkedIn message after a talk. Interest is real, but it's not the data point on which an investment decision belongs.

Commitment costs something: money, time, reputation, a signature. Whoever commits, risks. If nobody on the other side is risking, you have interest. You have no commitment.

Most innovation workshops produce interest and are subsequently treated as if they had produced commitment.

Hence the typical sequence: workshop, presentation in the leadership team, expansion of the plan, investment, six months of building, then the question "why isn't anyone buying this?". The answer is always the same: because nobody risked anything in the original workshop.

Three questions that separate the two

First question: Who in this room has the authority to sign a budget or start a pilot? If the answer is "nobody" or "this would have to be escalated", you're in an exploratory conversation. Treat it as such. Not as validation.

Second question: Which number on which quarterly goal improves for someone in the room if our suggestion works? If the answer is vague or missing, the economic lever is missing. No lever, no commitment.

Third question: What would be the next concrete step if we agree here, and who does it by when? If the next step is "we'll bring this to our innovation committee", you are no further along than before the workshop. If it's "a pilot with this department, contract by end of month", you have something that belongs in a plan.

Tell me about the last time

There's a fourth question I use in every customer conversation: Tell me about the last time this problem cost you something.

If the person tells a concrete story, with a number, a date, a person, a consequence, the problem is real. If they retreat to a general description, the problem may never have been in their daily life. They felt it was important because they discussed it in the workshop. That's not a signal. That's an echo.

This question works because it forces the separation between statements about problems and behaviour under problems. Problems that cost nothing don't get solved. Not by you either.

What to change

Three rules in handling innovation workshops and customer rounds.

First: Before every workshop, write down on half a page what measurable result would make it a success. A pilot contract, a binding pre-order, a specific commitment with a date. If you can't define this, you're not making an investment but staging an advertising event. Both have their place, but not in the same budget.

Second: After the workshop, don't expand a plan, design a test. What's the smallest step that lets you find out whether the interest from the workshop converts to commitment? Often: a paid pilot with two of the eight people. If nobody is willing to pay for it, the interest wasn't load-bearing.

Third: Introduce internal vocabulary that doesn't communicate workshop statements as validation. Concretely: in the next meeting, every sentence that begins with "the customers said" gets supplemented with "and what they concretely risked: …". If the second half stays empty, the first goes into the assumption category, not the validation category.

The expensive variant

The expensive variant of this mistake isn't the workshop itself. It's the quarter built on its basis. If a team is set up on an assumption born in a workshop but never tested, it doesn't cost the workshop price. It costs a quarter of development, an advertising campaign, perhaps an entire product investment.

The cheap variant is a question in the next meeting: Who concretely risked something here? If nobody, it's not yet a signal. It's an echo. Echoes are pleasant. They're just not a business.