Episode #43
43 - 30 Years at 3M Taught Rolf Biernath How to Kill a Bad Product Idea
Ninety percent of new product ideas never hit market expectations. Rolf Biernath spent 30 years at 3M finding out why. Henrik Johansson sits down with the founder of Biernath Consulting, inventor on 50+ U.S. patents across adhesives, optical displays, and microreplication. Rolf reviewed roughly fifty programs from his career and asked what question, asked earlier, would have saved each one. The answer became Build What Wins — a screen across viability, defensibility, feasibility, and timing, where every score requires matching evidence. Cost models and letters of intent count. Enthusiasm doesn’t. Also covered: how validation differs between B2B and consumer, why companies sit on competing ideas for years, and how a two-week pressure test replaces six months of fractured effort. Find Rolf at buildwhatwins.com and on LinkedIn, where he writes the Build What Wins newsletter.
