From Spreadsheet Chaos to a System of Record for Startup Innovation

Large CPG organizations run startup innovation across multiple business units simultaneously. Each team builds its own list of contacts, maintains its own evaluation notes, and tracks its own pilots. Without a shared system, the organization accumulates duplicated outreach, inconsistent evaluations, and critical institutional knowledge locked inside spreadsheets owned by individuals.

The deeper problem: when an innovation lead leaves, so does everything they knew. There is no continuity, no shared record, and no way for other teams to learn from what has already been tried.

SwitchPitch gave the company a single platform where all startup activity across business units is logged, tracked, and visible. Each team manages its own pipeline while the organization retains a complete, searchable record of every startup that has been evaluated, every relationship that has been pursued, and every pilot that has been run.

The stage-gate process that previously lived in email threads and spreadsheets moved into a structured workflow, giving innovation leaders visibility into where each engagement stands without needing to chase down status updates.

The shift from individual spreadsheets to a shared platform changed how the company thinks about innovation. It is no longer dependent on any single person's knowledge, network, or memory. When someone leaves, the record stays. When a new team wants to explore a space, they can see what has already been evaluated. When two teams are circling the same startup, the overlap is visible before it becomes wasted effort.

Pilots that used to stall because no one knew the current status now progress through a defined process with clear ownership at each stage. And launches that result from those pilots are documented in the same system, giving the whole organization a track record of what the innovation program has actually produced.