Bold Group
Everyone is doing their best, and the result still won’t move. The cause is usually where nobody is looking.
Notes from our fieldwork with client organisations: our direct experience combined with what we have read, distilled into learning points. Each names a problem, the condition that usually causes it and where to start. Because some points may not match your experience, each also says where its conclusion does not apply.
Grouped by problemEach note names the problem it addresses
Sources statedEvery figure has its source, date and limits
Updated October 2026Figures rechecked against the primary source
Field notes
Start with the problem you recognise.
Each note ends with a six-question self-check. Clients are not named; public companies are examples from published history.
Innovation spend that does not reach results
When the budget and the activity are real and the P&L does not move.
- Innovation ROIWhy Innovation Activity Rarely Reaches the P&LInnovation budgets rise while operating results stay flat. The cause usually sits in the measurement and funding system around the team, not in the team itself — and only a CEO can reopen it.9-minute read · self-check inside
- Innovation strategyRunning Core Improvement and New Growth Under One RoofThere are two distinct routes to competitive advantage, and they need opposite kinds of evidence. When one investment committee judges both by the same rules, your core approval process quietly starves your new growth strategy.6-minute read · self-check inside
- Innovation management systemISO 56001 as a Working System, Not a BinderPublished in September 2024, ISO 56001 is the first certifiable international standard for an Innovation Management System. Treated as a compliance exercise, it produces paperwork. Treated as a design specification, it gives leadership a repeatable way to govern innovation.7-minute read · self-check inside
A process or structure holding the result back
When every part performs and the whole does not.
- Process transformationWhen Stage-Gate Helps, and When It Kills Good IdeasStage-gate brought financial discipline to product development. When markets speed up or uncertainty rises, the time projects spend waiting for the gate — and the certainty the gate demands too early — becomes the cost nobody records.8-minute read · self-check inside
- Operating modelWhy Fixing One Department Rarely Fixes the ResultEvery function can hit its own target while the company result stays flat. The problem is usually not inside any single department. It sits in the handoffs, incentives and decision rules between them.8-minute read · self-check inside
People and methods
What capability and which method, for which situation.
- Innovation capabilityWhy Hiring Innovators Doesn’t Make a Company InnovativeSearching for rare innovative talent is slower and less reliable than building the capability inside your walls — and without changing how decisions and handoffs work, it ends in the same place with a larger salary bill.8-minute read · self-check inside
- Method fitWhere Design Thinking Works — and Where Another Tool Fits BetterDesign Thinking is one of the best methods ever built for discovering unmet human needs. When the problem is an operational bottleneck, a fixed factory asset or a regulated B2B specification, starting with open-ended empathy often stalls the team.7-minute read · self-check inside
Technology that works and does not pay
When the capability is proven and the value never arrives.
- AI value realizationWhy Most AI Pilots Don’t Reach the P&LBuying models and running proofs of concept has never been easier. Turning those pilots into audited P&L savings or new revenue fails in four predictable places — none of them inside the algorithm.8-minute read · self-check inside
- Value across partiesWhy Recycled Plastics Stay Stuck at 9% — and How the Same Problem Shows Up Inside a CompanyGlobal plastic recycling is not held back by chemistry. It is held back because the party that pays for change is not the party that captures the gain — the exact same structural split that stalls cross-department projects inside a single company.7-minute read · self-check inside
Start here
Bring the result you need, and the thing you have been told cannot change.
One hour with a founder. You leave with a first view of where the answer may sit, and which engagement, if any, fits.
Teerasak WongpiyaCo-Founder and Managing Director
1 hour, in Thai or English, online or at your office.