Your innovation portfolio is probably three bets in disguise

Ask a leadership team how many innovation initiatives they are running and the answer is often thirty or more. Ask which customer problems those initiatives address and the list usually shrinks to three or four. The rest is the same idea pursued in parallel by different business units, each with its own budget, steering group and slide deck.

That is not automatically a mistake. Parallel attempts can be a deliberate hedge. But it should be a choice made with eyes open, not the by-product of nobody looking across the whole portfolio.

A portfolio is only diversified if its bets would fail for different reasons.

Count assumptions, not projects

Here is a test that takes an afternoon. For every initiative, write down the single assumption that would kill it if it turned out to be wrong. Not the risks, the one load-bearing belief. “Mid-market customers will self-serve onboarding.” “Regulators will allow remote verification.” “Our installers will sell the service plan.”

Then group initiatives by that assumption. In most portfolios we review, more than half the spend sits behind two or three assumptions. If one of them is wrong, a large share of the portfolio fails at once. That is concentration risk, and it rarely appears on any risk register.

Three moves that follow

1. Fund the evidence, not the project. For each shared assumption, put a small, fast budget behind testing it directly, before the initiatives that rely on it scale.
2. Merge where the bet is the same. Two teams testing the same assumption in different markets should share what they learn every fortnight, or become one team.
3. Add bets that fail differently. If everything depends on customers adopting a new channel, find something worth doing that would succeed even if they do not.

What good looks like

A healthy innovation portfolio is small enough to describe on one page and varied enough that no single wrong belief can sink it. Leaders can name each bet, the assumption behind it and the evidence that would change their mind. That clarity is worth more than any number of initiatives.