“Let a thousand flowers bloom” used to be Johnson & Johnson’s strategy to generative AI innovation. In short order, nearly 900 projects sprouted across the company.
But subsequent internal review revealed that only 10–15% of those projects produced 80% of the value. In response, J&J pivoted. It narrowed its focus to high-impact use cases, and scrapped the rest. These remaining efforts were tightly aligned with business strategy, execution quality and adoption.