Via McKinsey & Company

A lot of companies are well optimized on the delivery side, with milestones and deadlines. But the majority are not well optimized on the discover and define side. That’s seen as more of a black box—spread across different tools and media—and they lack process around it with defined steps and measured outcomes.

I think there is a big opportunity for companies to accelerate innovation and improve outcomes by approaching the discover and define phases similar to how they approach the deliver phase, with clear milestones and urgency.

— The Committed Innovator: Enabling and harnessing the innovation process, McKinsey

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Andrey Khusid (CEO of Miro) says a critical asymmetry exists in how organizations approach innovation. Innovation goes through distinct Discover-Define-Deliver steps, but most organizations lack process, defined steps, and measured outcomes for the first two phases.

“A lot of companies are well optimized on the delivery side, with milestones and deadlines. But the majority are not well optimized on the discover and define side.”

How this imbalance manifests:

• The synthesis bottleneck. A typical innovation workshop produces sticky notes that someone must synthesize into insights. This synthesis phase alone can take days or weeks. Then more weeks are needed for prototyping those ideas. Consequently, innovation energy dissipates and momentum is lost.
• Less rigor in early phases. Delivery gets milestones, deadlines, accountability, and measurement. Discovery and definition get… whatever happens across multiple tools and meetings with no clear ownership or urgency. This inconsistency creates a false assumption that early-stage work can’t be systematized.

Whether teams are optimizing supply chains, preparing marketing launches, or shipping products, they all follow the same Discover-Define-Deliver pattern. Yet most organizations only apply rigorous process management to the final phase.

Why this matters: The innovation bottleneck isn’t in Delivery. It’s in the process gaps between Discovery, Definition, and Delivery that organizations currently accept as inevitable.