For large companies operating in mature sectors—such as Procter & Gamble in consumer goods, Apple in consumer electronics, and Adobe in cloud software—driving growth is a perennial challenge. Growth through acquisition is always an option, but many companies quickly find that the costs outweigh the benefits.

The only reliable path to maintaining market leadership is what is widely known as transformational innovation—major changes in products and services that redefine customers’ expectations by delivering significantly improved performance, providing new kinds of value, resolving long-standing trade-offs, and/or radically reducing manufacturing costs. Think P&G’s Tide Pods laundry detergent, the Apple iPod, and Adobe’s subscription software as a service.

But innovation of this type is not only difficult to envision; it is also extremely challenging to develop and scale up. Even companies that invest in R&D on transformational innovations often terminate projects with compelling value propositions during the expansion phase because they are reluctant to commit the necessary resources. Many that invest to scale up big-bet innovation projects do so only to see them fail.

Articles such as “The Ambidextrous Organization” (HBR, April 2004) and “How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate” (HBR, June 2011) have sketched out a solution to the development challenge: Large companies should separate innovation units from the core business, and senior executives from the core business should maintain strategic synergy with the new units but keep their incentives and cultures separate. Research has shown that such ambidextrous organizations are 90% more effective at achieving transformational innovations than either fully integrated or totally separate organizational structures are. But scaling up within the ambidextrous model has proved difficult. In our work researching and practicing corporate innovation, we repeatedly find that companies struggle to allocate leadership attention, personnel, capital, and other resources between the core business and a transformational effort.

To gain insight into these challenges, we completed a detailed study of two Procter & Gamble transformational innovations: Oral-B iO, a high-performance electric toothbrush that step-changed consumers’ brushing habits to enable better oral health, and Always Infinity, a best-in-class menstrual pad that resolved the long-standing tension between comfort and protection. Although very different in nature, both products required investments that were material to the company’s overall operations, and both are major successes in mature, highly competitive markets. Both iO and Infinity provided transformational experiences for consumers—supporting premium pricing and enlarging their respective categories.

The two examples represent views of P&G’s strategy and innovation practices at different points in time: Always Infinity was launched in 2008, and Oral-B iO in 2020. Procter & Gamble’s strategy and practices have evolved since then. Nonetheless, studying how a complex organization persevered to create transformational innovations can be instructive for managers in many industries—and adds to the body of knowledge about innovation practices.

We looked at what worked in the scaling up of these projects—and what did not—from the perspectives of the managers, technology experts, and senior leaders involved in them. We then validated our findings across a range of industries by conducting 40 qualitative interviews with innovation practitioners and senior leaders from a large medical-device manufacturing company, a large integrated petroleum company, and a large manufacturer of construction and mining equipment.

In the following pages we draw on the experiences of Procter & Gamble and other big companies to present a playbook for scaling up transformational innovation. It’s organized around four major challenges: providing sufficient leadership, building the right team, unlocking resources, and making big-bet decisions.

Providing Sufficient Leadership

The leader of a business in which a transformational innovation is taking shape—typically the CEO or a business unit president (we’ll refer to this role as the CEO hereafter)—has a formidable responsibility: to manage the current business, which generates significant revenue and needs continual incremental innovation to hit short-term growth targets, while championing the transformational innovation that will lead to future growth, which requires large investments in resources and leadership attention. Unfortunately, many CEOs are biased toward focusing on the current business.

A quick scan of a typical CEO calendar supports this claim: Most of the scheduled time is allocated for managing current business operations and incremental innovations. Activities related to transformational innovations rarely appear except on special occasions, such as “Innovation Day.” It doesn’t help that CEOs can often meet near-term goals (and secure performance bonuses) by relying on incremental innovations. The result is that they usually have less mind space for the efforts that a transformational innovation requires, from developing an effective leadership team for the project to managing disagreements among stakeholders while encouraging active, open debate.

And although the senior R&D executive in a business unit will often initiate and sponsor transformational innovation projects during the ideation and development phases, our research makes clear that the CEO and the executive must partner closely to successfully drive these projects through the scaling up and launch phases. We have observed that CEOs can carve out time for those efforts in three ways.

Delegate operating decisions.

Leaders like making decisions—after all, to some extent it’s the ability to do so that won them their roles. Whether they started their careers in marketing, finance, or design, it is human nature to resist delegating decisions in their personal areas of expertise. That behavior is reinforced by another common bias—putting the urgent ahead of the important. Leaders who successfully scale up transformational innovations fight both biases in order to give a project the leadership bandwidth it will demand. A now-retired CEO of P&G’s Oral Care business, whose background was in marketing, told us, “If you compared my calendar to those of others in my role, you would find I spent way less time on the marketing. It is probably in some ways the most substantial choice I made.”

Articulate a purpose.

Changing existing work processes and cultural norms to accommodate transformational innovation is challenging in any large organization in which functional leaders have differing goals and performance scorecards. That creates a great deal of distraction for the CEO. Smart CEOs recognize that much conflict can be avoided by clearly communicating from the start why this innovation is worth it—how it will have an impact on (or make a difference in) consumers’ lives. A former leader of P&G’s Feminine Care business brought a sense of purpose to the organization: “to create products that women love every day, in every way, and all around the world, both functionally and emotionally.” Believing that “there was no other business in P&G where one could transform girls’ and women’s lives the way one could in Feminine Care,” the executive communicated that sense of purpose to the organization in a way that led to its being passionately embraced.