RHI Magnesita is the world’s leading supplier of refractory products — the materials that line furnaces, kilns, and other high-temperature industrial equipment. They operate in over 70 countries. Their annual revenue is measured in billions. I worked there as Innovation Manager, managing high-risk innovation projects and working with C-level executives.
What started as a role in innovation management became a fundamental rewrite of how I think about innovation.
The work involved navigating a challenging environment: siloed culture, competition between business units, and confusion among the innovation department, R&D, and the PMO. I walked factory floors. I sat in strategy meetings. I reviewed documentation.
Then the plant manager in one of their Austrian facilities said something that stopped me: “We don’t need new ideas. We have 300 ideas in a spreadsheet. We need someone to tell us which ones to kill.”
That single sentence redirected my entire approach to innovation.
The Subtraction Insight
The conventional innovation framework is additive: generate ideas, evaluate ideas, develop the best ones, launch. More ideas. More experiments. More initiatives. Innovation is treated as a volume game — throw enough at the wall and something will stick.
RHI’s problem was the opposite. They had too many ideas. Too many initiatives running simultaneously. Too many projects competing for the same engineering resources, budget, and management attention. The volume wasn’t creating innovation. It was creating fragmentation.
Each initiative individually was promising. Collectively, they were a drag. Resources spread across 300 ideas meant that no single idea received enough investment to succeed. The smartest engineers were context-switching between six projects. The budget was allocated in amounts too small to be decisive for any one project.
The insight that emerged — and that became central to everything I’ve built since — was that innovation isn’t primarily about adding. It’s about subtracting. Killing the 280 ideas that are good but not great, so that the 20 that are genuinely excellent can receive the resources they need to succeed.
This is where the subtraction audit was born. Not in a startup. Not in a small business. In a multinational industrial company with too many good ideas.
The Framework We Built
For RHI, we developed a three-filter system:
Filter one: Strategic alignment. Does this initiative directly serve one of the company’s three strategic priorities? Not “could it contribute to.” Directly serves. This filter eliminated approximately 40% of the 300 ideas immediately — ideas that were interesting but strategically peripheral.
Filter two: Resource reality. Given our current engineering capacity, budget, and timeline, can we properly resource this initiative? “Properly” meant: dedicated team, sufficient budget, clear milestones. Not “squeeze it into someone’s spare time.” This filter eliminated another 30%.
Filter three: Competitive advantage. If this initiative succeeds, does it create a capability that competitors cannot easily replicate? This filter was the sharpest — it distinguished between improvements (valuable but reproducible) and innovations (valuable and defensible). Another 15% fell away.
What remained: approximately 45 initiatives. Still more than ideal. But manageable, funded, and aligned.
What I Took From the Project
My time at RHI lasted roughly four years. The insights lasted permanently.
Insight one: Subtraction is harder than addition. Adding an initiative to a portfolio is psychologically easy — it’s optimistic, forward-looking, and doesn’t require saying no to anyone. Killing an initiative requires telling smart, passionate people that their idea isn’t going to be pursued. The political and emotional cost of subtraction is why most organizations never do it, and why their innovation portfolios bloat until nothing moves.
Insight two: The bottleneck is rarely ideas. In twenty years of working with companies of all sizes, I’ve never met an organization that lacked ideas. The bottleneck is always execution capacity — the number of things the organization can properly do at any one time. Recognizing this changes the entire innovation conversation from “how do we generate more ideas?” to “how do we execute fewer ideas better?”
Insight three: The framework scales. The subtraction audit that emerged from the RHI project works at every scale. I’ve applied it to Vulpine (where it helped us focus from eight potential products to three), to Startup Burgenland (where it helped founders narrow their focus), and to my own current work (where it keeps my publishing and building activities aligned rather than scattered).
The principle is universal: what should you stop doing to make space for what matters most?
Working With Industrial Giants as a Small Firm
Working inside a multinational industrial company also taught me what it looks like when innovation gets stuck — not from lack of ideas, but from organizational complexity. The experience of navigating those internal dynamics shaped how I later designed programs for startups: keep things focused, keep decisions fast, and never let a good idea die from bureaucratic neglect.
My time at RHI changed my career. Not because of any single project — because one plant manager’s sentence — “tell us which ones to kill” — crystallized a principle that had been forming for years. Subtract to ship. Remove to improve. Kill to innovate.
That experience changed how I think. The thinking became a methodology. The methodology became the foundation of everything I do now. One sentence. Everything shifted.
