What is Innovation Portfolio?
The practice of managing innovation as a diversified portfolio of bets rather than a single initiative: incremental improvements that pay off reliably, adjacent bets with moderate risk, and transformative experiments with high uncertainty. Portfolio thinking accepts that most experiments fail, and designs for the portfolio to win overall.
My perspective
In practice
The portfolio lens stops two common failures: over-investing in one moonshot, or starving everything that is not the current cash cow. I help teams map their initiatives on an explore-exploit axis, define a budget split (a common starting point: 70% core, 20% adjacent, 10% transformative), and set kill criteria up front so experiments end on evidence, not inertia. Agent-driven experimentation makes the explore side dramatically cheaper, which shifts the math toward more, smaller bets.