Eight questions on whether your innovation effort is structured to produce commercial outcomes: problem selection, portfolio focus, validation, funding gates, experiments, leadership tolerance, scaling and learning.
Innovation activity is easy to generate and easy to admire: labs, sprints, showcases. This assessment ignores the activity and scores the system: how problems are chosen, how bets are funded and killed, and whether anything learned survives.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
A complimentary first report puts your innovation portfolio in front of operators who have built, scaled and shut comparable ones. The challenge comes back as a confidential report from the Global Board.
Bring independent operator perspectives into this decisionAnswer for how initiatives were actually selected, funded and stopped in the last year, not for the innovation strategy document.
This is innovation as performance: initiatives chosen for optics, pilots engineered to succeed, and nothing ever killed. The budget is buying morale and announcements, which have value. But the organisation should not expect new revenue from a system with no mechanism for producing it.
The vocabulary and structures are in place (portfolios, gates, hypotheses) but the incentives underneath still point the old way: gates that never fire, failure that is officially fine and practically fatal. The system produces motion and consumes credibility, which is a wasting asset.
The system genuinely works: problems are chosen deliberately, evidence gates funding, and honest failure is survivable. The characteristic remaining fault is the last mile: validated concepts queuing at the border of the core business, which has quarterly targets and no reason to adopt someone else's risk.
These answers describe a rare thing: an innovation system with working feedback loops from problem to scale. The exposure at this level is the system's own success criteria: a disciplined machine optimises towards what its gates can measure, and the threats that end companies rarely arrive in measurable increments.
An innovation function can run continuously (sprints scheduled, demos delivered, walls covered in canvases) while producing no commercial outcome whatsoever, because none of that activity requires an idea to ever face a customer, a gate or a P&L. The eight questions here score the parts that create consequence, which are the parts that organisations most often skip.
Three answers per question at 0, 5 and 10 points, totalled and normalised to 100 across four bands. The arithmetic is fixed and runs locally; nothing you answer is stored. Score the last twelve months of actual behaviour, and resist the pull of the strategy document.
If a single number predicts innovation health, it is how many initiatives were stopped by evidence in the past year. A portfolio where nothing dies is not a portfolio; it is a queue of commitments accumulating sunk cost and political protection. Healthy systems kill early, cheaply and without career damage, which is why the funding-gate and leadership-tolerance questions carry the story.
It means your system converts effort into evidence and evidence into decisions efficiently. What it cannot guarantee is that you are pointing that system at the right problems. That is a strategy question, and worth independent challenge on its own.
The disciplines matter more at small scale, not less, because each bet is a larger share of everything. A founder asking "what evidence would make us stop?" before spending is the same question as a gate. The formality is optional; the question is not.
Ignore the stated policy and trace the people: find the last two teams whose experiments returned a clear negative result, and look at what happened to them next. If nobody can recall a clearly reported negative result, score the question 0. That silence is the answer.