Engage to Innovate — Rescuing Brevia Sense

A four-round, advanced Innovation Management simulation set inside Brevia Strumenti S.p.A., a EUR 96M mid-sized precision-instruments maker in Lecco, Lombardy that has competed on mechanical precision for four decades and never shipped a connected product. Its flagship bet — Brevia Sense, a wireless app-connected smart caliper — launched 14 months ago with a EUR 6.4M budget and an 18-person cross-functional squad. At the quarterly steering review on 12 May 2026 the sponsor called the status a flatline: EUR 4.1M is spent, EUR 2.3M of runway remains at a EUR 290k/month burn, 4 of the last 6 sprint milestones were missed, the engagement pulse has collapsed from 78 to 41 (two of four firmware engineers want transfers), the 41-requirement scope is frozen solid while the German Tier-1 customer (EUR 11M of annual sales) now wants edge filtering that was never specified, and 9 surfaced engineer ideas have all been deferred to 'after launch'. The board-committed EMO Hannover pilot is 18 weeks away and the pilot currently lands 5 weeks late. Playing the Innovation Project Lead, you (1) DIAGNOSE the flatline — separating the delivery problem from the human problem from the process problem and naming the single root cause that unlocks the others; (2) SET PROJECT FLEXIBILITY — choosing how much of the 41-requirement scope to keep frozen versus convert to a re-negotiable backlog and at what cadence change is allowed — and CHOOSE ENGAGEMENT INTERVENTIONS from a costed menu (a EUR 0 idea-adoption ritual that ships squad ideas but costs scope, a EUR 60k co-located war-room week, bringing the customer into sprint reviews, backfilling two departing engineers at EUR 45k, or a recognition-and-autonomy redesign), tying each to the metric it should move; (3) ALLOCATE finite sprint capacity across firmware-app integration (the critical path), the customer's unplanned edge-filtering request, technical-debt cleanup and demo hardening, define the minimum-credible pilot, and absorb a mid-round shock (a firmware engineer is poached); and (4) RECOVER and INSTITUTIONALIZE — reporting the four KPIs against the Round-1 baseline, making a go/no-go pilot recommendation, and defining the operating model the squad keeps after the crisis. The math rewards treating engagement as a measurable, designable lever, the right amount of flexibility, visible idea adoption, a critical-path-first allocation and a genuinely minimum-viable pilot — and punishes the five classic errors: schedule-only thinking that ignores the collapsed pulse, freezing all 41 requirements, deferring every idea again, buying activity without measuring the KPI shift, and gold-plating the pilot until the runway runs dry. Final KPIs track Idea Adoption, Team Engagement, Milestone Slippage (weeks late) and Delivered Value at EMO (EUR M), with EUR 2.3M of runway to defend.