Identifying the Intangible Blockers to Moonshot Innovation
\ CASE STUDY
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
“Ambition wasn’t our problem. What we lacked was the courage to take greater risks. INSI gave us that confidence—and the alignment to turn bold bets into faster results.”
— Jeff Allyn, Chief Executive Officer, ThinkOnward
Background
ThinkOnward, a Shell company, was created as the innovation arm of Shell, deliberately positioned outside the traditional corporate walls to spark fresh thinking. Its mission: shift mindsets toward creativity, pioneer new ways of working, and accelerate the path to breakthrough discoveries.
By leveraging Shell's vast resources and a community of more than 6,000 global innovators, ThinkOnward set out to move ideas from concept to impact faster than ever before. The mandate was clear: take bigger bets, embrace risk, and learn quickly from failure.
Yet despite this ambition, CEO Jeff Allyn saw that the moonshot team was holding back. Instead of boldly experimenting, progress was slowed by hidden blockers like hesitation, misalignment, and an instinct to play it safe. Jeff wanted hard data to confirm his concerns and illuminate what was preventing the team from turning bold ambition into breakthrough results.
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The Challenge
ThinkOnward had the mandate, the talent, and Shell's backing. What it lacked was visibility into the intangible human dynamics slowing innovation from the inside. The barriers weren't technical—they were behavioral and cultural:
1. Competing priorities: Teams across functions were pulled toward different innovation agendas, with no shared framework for deciding where to focus energy or resources.
2. Limited cross-functional bandwidth: Silos limited collaboration and created duplication, slowing execution and reducing the quality of outcomes when speed mattered most.
3. Blurred ownership and accountability: Responsibility for innovation outcomes was undefined, making it difficult to track progress, course-correct, or celebrate wins in a meaningful way.
4. Hidden cultural blockers: Leadership behaviors that discouraged risk-taking, slowed decision-making, or defaulted to consensus over conviction were invisible to the team and unaddressed.
5. No repeatable innovation capability: ThinkOnward had ambition but lacked a structured, scalable way to embed innovation disciplines consistently across teams and over time.
Our Approach
C\R Strategy partnered with ThinkOnward to uncover these intangible blockers and co-create a repeatable innovation capability.
Using our Innovation Navigation Styles Inventory (INSI), we provided data-driven insight into the leadership dynamics and team frictions that had previously gone unseen. For the first time, ThinkOnward had measurable evidence of what was slowing them down and a clear path forward.
The work followed four connected phases:
1. Diagnose – Apply INSI to reveal hidden leadership and cultural blockers across the ThinkOnward team.
2. Align – Build a shared innovation thesis and common language across stakeholders, enabling clearer prioritization and faster decision-making.
3. Develop – Coach leaders on measurable innovation behaviors, with a focused emphasis on courage, speed, and disruptive thinking.
4. Sustain – Establish quarterly INSI team health checks and repeatable innovation processes to lock in gains over time.
Learning & Outcomes
Within months, ThinkOnward began building lasting momentum:
• Alignment: Stakeholders and operating teams now rally around a shared innovation thesis and language, replacing fragmented priorities with a unified direction.
• Consistency: Innovation leadership behaviors are measured and actively developed, giving the organization a reliable signal for where to invest coaching and support.
• Velocity: Internal teams test, refine, and scale ideas faster, with fewer bottlenecks—a direct result of clearer ownership and stronger cross-functional alignment.
• Risk Literacy: Leaders developed a shared language for risk orientation, enabling more productive conversations about when to push further, when to pivot, and when to stop.
• External Orientation: Teams gained tools to widen their field of vision beyond internal assumptions and engage more proactively with external market signals and customer realities.
• Resilience: Quarterly INSI health checks provide ongoing visibility into team mindset and capacity, ensuring that gains are sustained—not lost—as the organization evolves.
The Results
Early outcomes show tangible gains, with each result directly addressing one of the five original challenges:
1. Competency gaps closed: Four critical innovation competency gaps: external vision, rapid decision-making, market empathy, and disruptive ideation, were identified and actively addressed through targeted development.
2. +35% cross-functional synergy: Fewer reworks and faster consensus on technical paths, as teams gained a shared language for collaboration and decision-making.
3. +45% increase in velocity: Greater speed in prototyping and sprints, driven by stronger alignment, clearer ownership, and reduced friction across teams.
4. Repeatable innovation rituals: Quarterly INSI health checks are now embedded as a standing practice, giving ThinkOnward ongoing visibility into team mindset and capacity over time.
5. Shared innovation language: Stakeholders across ThinkOnward and Shell aligned on a common framework for evaluating risk, prioritizing bets, and tracking innovation progress, replacing ambiguity with accountability.
ThinkOnward is now equipped with the cultural and leadership tools to make its moonshot ambitions real.