At Domino’s, we once had an idea.
Show each store what was being added to a customer’s shopping basket — before the customer hit order.
The thinking was simple. If the store could see what was likely coming, they could start making the pizza in advance. They could get ahead of the rush rather than being buried by it. Anyone who has worked in a busy Domino’s knows the rule: if a store falls behind in a rush, it is very hard to recover.
There was no business case. We just built it and tried it.
The feedback was extraordinary. The system surfaced operational challenges nobody had known existed. It changed how stores thought about preparation. And it gave them, for the first time, a way to pre-empt the surge rather than chase it.
Here is the part worth sitting with. If we had tried to make a business case for that idea first, it would have died. The benefits could not be quantified until the experiment had run. And the experiment could not run until it cleared a process that demanded the benefits be quantified.
That is the trap this piece is about. It is not a Domino’s problem. It is in every large company I work with, and it has a name.
Death by business case.
The Issue
You are very good at big, planned investments. But the way you prioritise them quietly kills small ideas — and the problem is attention, not money.
Everything competes for your attention on the same basis: the size of the business case. A small idea can never build as big a case as a major programme, so it sits permanently at the bottom of your list. It is never rejected. It just never reaches the top, never gets discussed, never gets a decision.
The big bets crowd out the small ones not because they are better, but because they are bigger. And because a small idea cannot yet prove a return, it cannot even compete for the airtime that would let it become one.
So you do not have a budget problem. You have an attention problem. Your prioritisation system is built to rank scale, and small ideas have no scale to offer yet.
Why It Matters
Every big investment you have ever made started life as a small, uncertain idea. If there is nowhere for those ideas to survive, you are quietly eating your own seed corn. And the ideas you lose this way are not the weak ones. They are the early-stage ones — which is exactly the pool every future big bet comes from.
The danger is that this feels like good discipline right up until it is not. You look efficient and well run, while a competitor who was willing to back small ideas walks past you.
This is not just a boardroom worry. The Bank of England has shown that the gap between frontier firms and the rest has been widening, with the engine that spreads good ideas from leaders to laggards slowing — and perhaps stalling — and more so in the UK than elsewhere. BCG’s UK growth unit put a sharper number on it recently, finding that the bar to sit among the country’s most productive firms is actually lower today than it was in the late 1990s. Standing still is not standing still. It is sliding back.
One honest caveat: the core business still comes first. This is a steady investment in the future, made from a position of strength. It is not something to bet the house on, and it is not where you would double down in a downturn.
Why This Happens to Every Big Business
It is worth saying plainly that this is not a failing peculiar to you. Every organisation slows down as it grows, and it does so for reasons that are nobody’s fault in particular.
As a business gets larger, coordinating it gets harder, approvals lengthen, and each function quite reasonably adds its own checks. Studies consistently find that the same decision that takes a fortnight in a small company takes a month or more in a large one. None of these steps is wrong on its own. They simply accumulate.
The deeper cause is the speed of the feedback loop. A small team gets an idea in front of a customer, sees what happens, and adjusts within days. A large organisation makes fewer, bigger, slower course-corrections, because the signal has to travel up and back down through all those layers before anyone can act. The bigger and more successful you become, the slower that loop tends to get.
That is the real reason small ideas struggle here. And it is why the answer cannot be “try harder to spot them.” The system itself has to give them a faster, shorter loop of their own.
Why Now: The Window Has Shrunk
This has always been a risk, but it was a slow one. For most of corporate history, even when disruption came, it came slowly enough that a big, deliberate organisation could see it and respond. You could afford to let a small idea sit at the bottom of the list, because whatever it addressed was years away.
AI has ended that. The time it takes a competitor to come at you has collapsed from years to months — and the thing the market now rewards is exactly the thing you are slowest at: spotting a small idea and acting on it quickly. Every idea you push through a heavy planning loop before anyone can move carries a hidden cost in lost time, a delay tax you used to be able to afford. You cannot any more. The pace at which a small team can now stand up a working system in days rather than months is the same pace at which a competitor can build the thing you have been waiting to write a business case for.
In other words, the habit of making small ideas wait their turn behind the big business cases was always a quiet risk. AI has just made it a fast one.
A Faster Route In: An External Partner
There is a practical way to get moving quickly without first having to change your own culture: bring in an external partner who already works at this speed.
It sidesteps the hardest part of the problem. Rather than forcing your careful, deliberate internal teams to suddenly behave like a startup, you work with people who already do — and you get ideas tested in weeks rather than quarters. Given how short the window now is, that head start matters.
The sensible thing is to structure it so you keep the option to bring capability in-house as it proves out. The partner gives you pace now and shows you how it is done, with a clear path to take on more of the learning, the data, and the decisions yourself over time as you choose to. That way an external partner is the fastest route from “we have no room for small ideas” to “we are testing them next month,” while leaving the door open to build the internal muscle at your own pace.
What a Response Might Look Like
This is not a separate “fast team versus slow team” split. That has been tried widely, and it tends to create two warring camps and an innovation unit that drifts off and dies.
If you wanted to address it, three moves would be worth exploring:
- A separate list for small ideas. They are judged against each other — best small idea against best small idea — not thrown into the ring against major programmes they can never out-size. This is the heart of it. Small ideas get their own place to be seen, so good ones stop dying at the bottom of the big list.
- A small, fast funding panel sitting outside the normal committee, backing ideas the way an investor would: small cheque, short deadline, more money only if early results justify it, and a failed experiment treated as a cheap answer rather than a black mark.
- A “size the hurdle to the bet” rule, so the scrutiny grows with the money at stake, not with the ambition of the idea.
The wider point, well made by Nesta, is that money alone is not the fix. Investment only pays off if the engine it is poured into actually works, so that ideas go on to become real products and services. This is about fixing the engine, not adding fuel.
Keeping Control Without Strangling It
The thinking here is that the amount of scrutiny should match the amount of money at risk, not the size of the ambition.
- A tiny experiment (a few thousand pounds, a few weeks): one page, name the biggest unknown, go. No finance, risk or compliance sign-off, because the cheque is too small to need it.
- A promising idea that wants more money: show what you learned, get a bit more, stay inside the protected pot.
- A real contender ready to scale: now it goes through the full process — business case, risk, compliance and finance — because now the money justifies it.
“Light-touch” would not mean “rubber stamp.” Every stage still has a named owner who can kill it. The point is not lower standards. It is standards applied in proportion. Nothing escapes scrutiny; the scrutiny just arrives when the stakes are real.
Keeping Cyber and Legal Standards Intact Without Smothering the Partner
This is the part that usually sinks these arrangements, so it is worth being clear.
Cyber and legal are not like a business case. You cannot size them to the bet and skip them on the small stuff, because a tiny experiment can still leak customer data or breach a regulation. But applying them the way you would to a major programme will smother a fast partner. The way through is to keep the standards exactly as they are and change what sets them off. The trigger is not the size of the idea. It is what the idea can actually touch.
The practical move is to give the partner a walled-off space to work in: made-up or anonymised data, an isolated system with no live connection into your core. Inside that space there is nothing dangerous to govern, so the heavy controls simply do not bite, and the partner runs at full speed. The standards wait at the edge of the sandbox rather than sitting on the partner’s shoulder.
You vet the partner properly — but once, at the start of the relationship, rather than for every experiment. They show evidence that they meet a recognised security standard (the usual ones are Cyber Essentials, SOC 2 and/or ISO 27001), the cyber and legal expectations go into the contract up front, and from then on you watch in the background rather than asking again each time. Modern tools make that monitoring light: the partner is checked continuously and only interrupted if something actually trips.
The one line you do not move is the gate between the sandbox and the real thing. The moment an experiment wants live customer data, a connection into a production system, or to go in front of a real customer, then those contact points are assessed, with no exceptions.
Where This Could Go
None of this needs deciding now. But if it is worth pursuing, the shape would be:
- a separate, protected route for small ideas with its own funding;
- a fast panel to look at them outside the usual committee; and
- a clear path by which a proven idea graduates into a full strategic investment, so a success has somewhere to go rather than dying for lack of a home.
An external partner could be the quickest way to stand any of this up.
In One Line
Every big investment you make started as a small, risky idea — and right now, you may have nowhere for those ideas to survive. It is worth asking whether that is a gap you can still afford, now that AI has shortened the time you have to fill it.
Colin Rees is the founder of Xpera, where we help boards, chief executives and operating teams move faster on the small ideas that matter — without losing the discipline of the strategic plan. If this conversation resonates, get in touch.