JimCarroll

I’ve been covering the link between future trends and innovation strategies for 30+ years. I went back through my blog posts, stretching to 2002, to dig out the nuggets of innovation insight I’ve discovered along the way. This series revisits those stories, tests what still holds up, and turns them into practical lessons for what comes next.

---

“Innovative organizations make big bets.”

I’ve had the privilege, over the years, of watching what separates genuinely innovative organizations from the ones just going through the motions: clients like National Australia Bank, Diners Club, H.J. Heinz, Nestlé. The pattern isn’t subtle: the innovative ones commit at scale. They don’t nibble at the edges of a trend, they make a big bet on its scope and size, then innovate at a furious pace to keep up.

One financial services client saw mobile banking coming and didn’t pilot it quietly in a corner. They made an across-the-board bet on it, knowing it would mean serious business-model disruption along the way. Another realized how much social networking was reshaping their brand exposure and boosted total marketing spend by 20% on the strength of that one insight, redirecting existing budget on top of it.

Small hedges feel safe. They also guarantee you arrive at the future late, and underpowered, right behind everyone who bet big and got there first.

So what can you learn from this? Don’t think small. Make the bet big enough to matter. Here are three questions to put on the table.

Action Items:

• Pick one trend your organization has been “monitoring” for over a year without committing real budget to it. Make the bet this quarter.
• Audit your last three innovation investments. Were they sized to actually matter, or sized to be easily defensible if they failed?
• Ask your leadership team directly: what’s the biggest bet we’re afraid to make right now, and what’s actually stopping us?

Explore the full How Innovation Happens series.

---

Real-World Examples

These researched examples show the lesson at work in the real world.

Neste: €1.22 billion invested before renewable diesel had a mass market

In 2007, the Finnish oil refiner Neste announced a €550 million renewable-diesel refinery in Singapore. The next year it committed another €670 million to a comparable plant in Rotterdam. The easy decision would have been to keep experimenting at its existing Finnish refinery and wait for customers to appear.

Instead, Neste funded world-scale production before demand was established. Both plants were operating by 2011. The company had not simply added a greener product to its catalogue; it had committed industrial-scale capital, new facilities and its future technical expertise to a different energy market.

In a later retrospective, a senior Neste executive acknowledged that there were very few customers in sight when the early investments began. The strategy was not without complications: feedstock sustainability, changing government incentives and uneven demand have all required adaptation.

But by 2025 Neste reported approximately 5.5 million tonnes of annual renewable-products capacity. The important distinction is that its investment helped create the scale needed to serve an emerging market, rather than waiting for that market to feel safe.

Why it matters: The lesson: a serious strategic bet commits real capital and capabilities before the outcome is assured, while leaving room to adapt as the market develops.

Sources:

Mercado Libre: An online marketplace bets on physical logistics

Latin America’s Mercado Libre could have remained a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers while leaving delivery entirely to established carriers. Instead, it made a more demanding bet: it would help build and coordinate the logistics infrastructure required to make online shopping dependable across a fragmented region.

In 2017, its Brazilian Mercado Envios operation opened a 17,000-square-metre fulfilment centre in Louveira to handle storage, packing, shipping and post-sale service for marketplace merchants. It was a commitment to warehouses, operational systems and delivery performance, not merely another software feature. The facility expanded to approximately 51,000 square metres the next year.

The larger network still relies heavily on third-party delivery partners; the innovation was taking responsibility for orchestrating the entire experience. By 2024, Mercado Envios handled 1.8 billion items and 49% were delivered the same or following day.

That year, Mercado Libre opened another ten fulfilment centres. The company chose to invest beyond the boundaries of its original digital business because the future of that business depended on solving a physical problem at scale.

Why it matters: The lesson: sometimes the big bet is building a capability your industry normally outsources, because the customer experience cannot improve without it.

Sources: