Everyone could say no and nobody could say yes

The alternatives existed. A basis for comparing them did not.

An 8 to 10 week sprint, from July 2025. A European building products company of around €500M revenue. A standalone piece, not part of a series.

The company makes sandwich panels: two metal faces bonded to an insulating core, used for the walls and roofs of industrial buildings. The core is the product. It is what insulates, and it is what determines how the panel behaves in a fire.

Both cores in use, PIR (polyisocyanurate foam) and mineral wool, are carbon-intensive, and both face rising regulatory and customer pressure for sustainable alternatives. That pressure is the operating condition the product now sits in, not a forecast about one.

Three things stopped the company acting: gaps in technical performance data, inconsistent fire-resistance data, and few proven bio-based options. Standing still carried its own cost. High production costs, scarce market-ready solutions and heavy R&D requirements delayed adoption and put share at risk in the growing low-carbon construction segment.

The shape of the problem matters. The company was not waiting for a material to be invented. Candidates existed. It was waiting for a reason to prefer one, and that reason never arrived.

Four tests, four owners, and nobody holding all four at once

Nobody at this company needed to be told about insulation. They make panels for a living. R&D knows the chemistry, production knows what the line will run, regulatory knows the fire standards, and the commercial team knows what a building specifier will sign off.

That expertise is the problem. The work had to clear four feasibility tests: technical, operational, economic and sustainability. Each test sits with a different function, and each function can disqualify a material on its own.

R&D rejects on performance. Production rejects on the line. Finance rejects on cost. Regulatory rejects on fire. None of them can approve, because approval means clearing all four, and clearing all four is nobody’s remit.

So the evaluation never failed. It stalled. Each function tested whichever candidates reached it, against its own threshold, at whatever pace its year allowed. One material cleared a gate in March, another cleared a different gate in June, and no single document ever held them side by side.

Fire resistance bit hardest. The data on it was inconsistent, and for a panel in a building, fire performance is the test that disqualifies outright. Inconsistent data left every candidate simultaneously alive and dead, which is the most expensive state a shortlist can occupy.

Then there is the scale of the work. Thirteen candidate materials against four tests is 52 assessments, every one held to the same definition, on top of 20+ internal interviews to establish what each function’s threshold actually is. That is a full-time job for a team, and it is precisely the work that does not fit around a product range shipping this year. We ran it in 8 to 10 weeks with dedicated people.

Four private standards became one specification, and thirteen candidates became four

What that enables. The next conversation is which of three pathways to pilot, not whether a bio-based core is worth investigating at all. That is a shorter agenda, and it ends in a decision.

No material was adopted and no pathway was piloted

No material was adopted. Four viable alternatives were identified and three pathways defined. No pathway was piloted, and no panel was made with a new core during the sprint.

The 40% is potential. It is a modelled consequence of a decision the company had not yet taken, and it applies to panel core production, not to a finished panel and not to the company.

Fire performance was assessed, not certified. The sprint produced a comparable view of where each candidate stands. Certification is granted by a third party against a published standard, and the underlying test data sits with the client and is confidential.

Source. All figures come from the SprintlyWorks engagement record for Bio-Based Solutions for Panel Insulation, a European building products company of around €500M revenue: 20+ internal interviews, 13 materials benchmarked, 4 viable alternatives identified, 3 feasible strategies defined, and a 40% potential carbon footprint reduction. The quote comes from its Head of Product and Services. We describe clients without naming them, and the four shortlisted materials, their suppliers and the customers who would receive them do not appear here.

Tell us the question nobody has the bandwidth to answer

We run 8 to 10 week sprints for industrial companies that have a decision to take and no spare team to take it with. You get named people, a defined question, and the evidence in your hands at handover.

If an evaluation in your business has been running for more than a year without a decision, stop asking which option is best and ask this instead. Which function is allowed to say yes, and against what? If the honest answer is nobody and nothing, more research will not end it.

Tell us the question. We will tell you whether a sprint can answer it, what it would take, and what you would hold at the end. If a sprint is the wrong tool, we will say so. Write to rahul.abhisek@sprintlyworks.com.