The Baker’s Dozen: How Data from 12 FOAK Pilot Projects Shaped Our Playbook
Scaling sustainable technologies from lab bench to commercial facility is never straightforward. Each first-of-a-kind (FOAK) pilot project carries a unique mix of technical hurdles, cost uncertainty, organizational challenges, and time pressure.
At Next Rung Technology, we’ve supported more than a dozen FOAK projects across sectors like cultivated meat, alternative proteins, mycelium, cotton, yeast, silk, chemicals, minerals, recycled textiles, biosurfactants, and pharmaceuticals.
These ranged from 6,000-liter pilots to facilities exceeding 145,000 square feet. Our work has spanned conceptual engineering, FEL 0/1 design, techno-economic analyses (TEAs), site selection, equipment procurement, project execution, and commissioning.
Forget Anecdotes: A Data-Backed Playbook You Can Trust
After years of helping companies navigate these transitions, we wanted to go beyond “lessons learned.” Too often in cleantech commercialization, best practices are handed down as anecdotes or one person’s war stories from a single project. Instead, we built a dataset.
The Baker’s Dozen framework distills insights from 12 FOAK pilot projects and grade outcomes against how many best practices were applied.
The results confirmed what our intuition already told us: the more best practices applied, the better the outcomes. But importantly, this moved us beyond opinions. It gave us evidence. Evidence that founders, investors, and corporate partners can rely on when making multimillion-dollar scale-up decisions.
Methodology:
We reviewed 12 first-of-a-kind (FOAK) pilot projects we had supported, each representing a different technology, scale, and business context. For every project, we mapped two things:
Outcomes: Was the pilot built and operating successfully? Did it meet its technical and commercial objectives? Was it re-scoped to a more viable pathway? Or was it cancelled altogether? Projects weren’t just graded “pass/fail”. We made sure to consider that some outcomes, like re-scoping or pausing, are healthy decisions in a scale-up journey.
Practices applied: We identified 14 recurring best practices, spanning technical, organizational, and communication disciplines. Each project was evaluated on whether and how thoroughly these practices were used.
By normalizing the projects against one another, we could see correlations between practice adoption and project outcomes. This evidence-based approach moves beyond opinions, showing what truly works in scaling sustainable technologies from pilot plant to commercial facility.
Results: More Practices, Better Outcomes
The data was clear: the most successful FOAK pilots applied more best practices. Projects that combined structured chartering, strong TEAs, roadmapping, and readiness assessments consistently outperformed those that skipped steps or improvised their way through scale-up.
Some practices stood out as particularly high-impact:
Chartering: Projects that started with a clear scope and success criteria saw the largest jump in outcomes (+2.7).
TEA (Techno-Economic Analysis): Robust economic modeling early in the process added +2.1 to project outcomes, often making the difference between credible funding and stalled fundraising.
Managing the Big Six (scope, schedule, cost, risk, quality, safety): Active management here correlated with +2.0.
Customer Focus: Teams that kept their product tied to end-user needs added +1.9 to outcomes.
Other practices like roadmapping, readiness assessments, scope discipline, and stage-gate decision also showed measurable positive effects, confirming that FOAK success depends on both technical execution and organizational discipline.
What’s equally important is what the data did not show: no single practice on its own guaranteed success. Instead, it was the cumulative effect of applying multiple practices consistently that shifted the odds in favor of a successful pilot.
Why it Matters
FOAK projects live in the most unforgiving space: high capital cost, unproven technology, urgent investor timelines, and pressure from all sides. Failures are common, but they don’t have to be inevitable.
By grounding best practices in a dataset rather than anecdotes, we can:
Show founders and investors where discipline pays off.
Help technical teams communicate more clearly with executives and funders.
Provide a playbook that applies across industries, not just one-off cases.
What’s Next
This post is the first in our Baker’s Dozen series. Each month, we’ll unpack best practices and how they contributed to real life success stories.
Our goal is to make the scale-up journey more transparent, more fundable, and more successful for everyone working to commercialize sustainable technologies.
Reach out if we can help you scale healthy, or sign up for our quarterly newsletter to stay connected.
Stay tuned, and let’s keep climbing the rungs together.