Building Spirent's Global Innovation Organization
Built a 70+ engineer organization from inception with $5M budget and executive-advisory scope
The Challenge
Spirent needed an innovation organization that could incubate new products, build platform capability, and drive AI-native engineering practices across a 500+ engineer portfolio spanning five product verticals. But "innovation" organizations often become orphaned R&D efforts that never connect to commercial reality. The challenge was to build something that would actually ship products, influence the broader organization, and justify its investment through measurable outcomes.
The Approach
- Built the organization from zero with a clear mandate: incubate products that could become revenue lines, not research projects - Established a multinational footprint across test and management, mobility, and platform engineering domains - Created an operating model with explicit stage gates: proof of concept, customer validation, commercial handoff - Built executive-advisory relationships across all five product verticals to ensure innovation work aligned with commercial priorities - Ran four concurrent strategic initiatives that all connected to the acquisition-readiness mandate
The Outcomes
Engineers built across test, mobility, and platform engineering
Annual budget under a zero-to-one mandate
Engineers influenced across five product verticals
Concurrent strategic initiatives culminating in acquisition
What I Learned
Innovation organizations fail when they optimize for novelty instead of commercial impact. Every initiative we ran had to connect to a customer problem and a revenue opportunity. The executive-advisory model worked because it gave vertical leaders ownership over innovation priorities—they weren't receiving mandates, they were co-creating the roadmap. The acquisition outcome validated the approach: the organization's work was directly cited in diligence as evidence of platform maturity and strategic capability.