Research and development projects are producing novel maintenance strategies and techniques. Anyway, it is not straightforward to transfer results from the lab to the real world, and thus many projects, both internal to a company and in cooperation between the members of a consortium, speculate how to perform this feat, called “exploitation” in the context of European projects. This paper discusses the necessity of novel techniques in modern maintenance, and then introduces a novel approach to the problem of transferring innovation from the lab to the market. The novel approach spawns from the “spiral software development” process and proceeds as a set of iterations that bring together different stakeholders to increase the number of products, techniques and results in general that can survive the end of a research and development project. The approach was applied to a large European project, which is described as use case, and the paper reports on the encouraging results that were attained.