---
id: "claim-workarounds-fund-rd"
type: "claim"
source_timestamps: ["¶11"]
tags: ["rd", "innovation", "customer-feedback"]
related: ["concept-customer-workaround", "concept-shadow-business-model", "contrarian-workarounds-are-prototypes", "quote-workaround-is-rd"]
confidence: "high"
testable: true
speakers: ["Donna Henrike Bohrer", "Karolin Frankenberger", "Joakim Wincent"]
sources: ["commercial"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-commercial"
originDay: 5
articleStem: "hbr-tier2-09-customer-workarounds"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/05/what-customer-workarounds-can-reveal-about-your-business-model"
sourceTitle: "What Customer Workarounds Can Reveal About Your Business Model"
---
# Workarounds Act as Customer-Funded R&D for New Business Models

**Claim:** A [[concept-customer-workaround]] is not merely a complaint or a compliance issue — it functions as customer-funded **R&D** for a company's next business model. Because the customer has already engineered the solution and is expending effort to maintain it, the willingness to pay is already proven; the company simply needs to formalize and monetize the structure the customer built.

**Confidence:** high (author's core assertion). **Testable:** yes — one could measure how often formalizing a documented workaround into a paid model produces revenue at or above the effort-cost baseline.

**Enrichment caution:** validation research supports the narrower reading — workarounds are signals of unmet needs and model mismatch — more strongly than the stronger "formal R&D causal mechanism" framing. The IS/process literature agrees workarounds are goal-driven adaptations revealing misalignment, but the leap to *proven willingness to pay* is an inference from behavior, not a measured WTP estimate (see [[counter-effort-not-wtp]]).

Captured verbatim in [[quote-workaround-is-rd]]; the underlying informal system is the [[concept-shadow-business-model]].

**Related:** [[concept-customer-workaround]] · [[concept-shadow-business-model]] · [[contrarian-workarounds-are-prototypes]]


## Related across articles
- [[claim-false-pmf]]
- [[claim-early-sales-debt-aids-discovery]]