‘Pilot Purgatory’: Is There an Outright Solution?
Yat Ming Ooi · Research-Technology Management · 2024
What exactly is pilot purgatory? Why a purgatory? According to Merriam-Webster (Citationn.d.), a purgatory is “a place or state of temporary suffering or misery.” Within the context of innovation and R&D management, we can understand pilot purgatory as a continuous state of experimentation with new technologies or knowledge. In practice, this is where firms, large and small, experiment with new technology at a pilot scale for an extended period of time due to their inability, lack of resources, and possibly lack of foresighting, to roll it out at a system-wide scale (Crews Citation2019; World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company Citation2018). It seems obvious that pilot purgatory could manifest into something far from being temporary. It can become a trap and a place for innovative ideas to die, never to see the light of day.