5 minute read
The rise of the Fusion Stakeholder and why they’re reshaping enterprise innovation
Tom Shepherd
Head of Business Development
For years, enterprise technology decisions followed a familiar pattern. Strategy sat with the business. Budgets lived with IT. Delivery success was defined by stability, uptime, and control.
That model no longer reflects the reality of today and certainly not that of tomorrow.
In 2026, the leaders driving growth, innovation, and transformation sit between traditional functions. They are accountable for commercial outcomes, customer experience, operational performance, and the pace of innovation, depending on technology to make all that happen.
We call them Fusion Stakeholders.
Who is the Fusion Stakeholder?
The Fusion Stakeholder isn’t defined by a single job title. They may be a Product Director, a Head of Digital, a Director of Customer Experience, a Head of Transformation, a COO, or a divisional business leader. In some organisations they sit in Product. In others, Operations or Strategy. In many businesses, their role simply didn’t exist five years ago.
What unites them isn’t where they sit on the org chart though, but what they’re ultimately responsible for.
Fusion Stakeholders are outcome owners. They’re accountable for:
- Turning strategy into delivery
- Proving that innovation creates measurable business impact
- Improving customer or operational performance
- Delivering change at pace, without breaking the organisation
They speak the language of business, product, and technology fluently but don’t sit in a traditional IT seat.
Living in the tension zone
Fusion Stakeholders operate in a constant tension zone.
The business wants speed, growth, and visible results. Boards and finance teams want proof of ROI before approving further investment. Customers expect better experiences, faster responses, and smarter services. At the same time though, legacy systems, governance, risk, and organisational complexity slows everything down.
Common frustrations we hear include:
+ “We’ve proven value in pilots, but we can’t scale them.”
+ “Innovation keeps getting stuck between teams.”
+ “The business wants speed, IT wants control, and we’re stuck in the middle.”
+ “We need to show results fast or the funding disappears.”
They’re expected to deliver innovation but often without a clear framework, a lack of full control of delivery, and with very little tolerance for failure. That pressure shapes how they buy and how they show up in the market.
How Fusion Stakeholders choose partners
Fusion Stakeholders don’t buy technology for its own sake. They don’t care about tools, platforms, or hype. They buy confidence.
Specifically, they look for partners who can:
- Help them identify the right opportunity to focus on
- Prove value quickly and credibly
- Reduce political, financial, and delivery risk
- Bring IT onside once belief is established
- Scale success safely across the enterprise
This is why so many AI and transformation programmes stall. Large consultancies feel safe, but often move too slowly. Product agencies move fast, but struggle to scale safely in complex, heavily regulated environments. The result is pilot paralysis - impressive demonstrations that never develop into full enterprise capability.
This is innovation theatre.
Why GW is a strong fit for Fusion Stakeholders
We’re built for this exact reality.
We work with Fusion Stakeholders who need to move from ambition to impact - quickly, safely, and with confidence. Our approach mirrors how modern enterprises actually adopt innovation, rather than how strategy decks say they should.
We start by helping organisations assess where intelligence and modernisation will create the most value, then proving that value quickly by building enterprise-ready products that demonstrate measurable impact in weeks, not years. From there, we scale success through integration, iteration, and adoption evolving capability over time to sustain advantage.
This approach has helped organisations in high-pressure, high-stakes environments deliver real outcomes.
For example, at Arqiva, that meant designing and delivering a secure, customer-facing portal in just 90 days, achieving 90% adoption at launch and supporting a multi-million-pound, decade-long contract renewal. The priority wasn’t experimentation. It was proving value quickly, without compromising security or long-term scalability.
Inside Atradius, it meant taking a single, time-critical proof-of-concept and evolving it into an 11-year partnership, unlocking new sales channels and modernising customer experience along the way. Progress came not from big-bang transformation, but from focusing on one meaningful problem at a time and scaling success with intent.
From experimentation to belief
Fusion Stakeholders don’t need more ideas. They need momentum.
They need early wins that build belief - belief with boards, finance teams, IT, and their own stakeholders. They need partners who understand the reality they operate in, and who can remove the false trade-offs between speed and safety, innovation and scalability.
That’s why our work is anchored around a simple principle: prove value first.
When belief is established early, everything that follows becomes easier. Alignment improves, risk decreases, and innovation is given permission to scale.
A different way forward
The rise of the Fusion Stakeholder reflects a broader shift in how organisations create value. Innovation is no longer owned by a single function, rather it exists at the intersection of business ambition, product thinking, and technology execution.
Fusion Stakeholders are the people navigating that intersection every day.
Our role is to help them do it with clarity, confidence, and measurable impact - turning innovation from something experimental into something enterprise-critical.Maybe you see yourself as a Fusion Stakeholder? If you do, connect with me - we should talk…
Product Design
