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Most corporate innovation programs don't fail because the ideas were bad. They fail because of how the bets were structured.
Here’s the reality: if you've put your innovation hopes behind one big idea, you're not being bold. You're being fragile. The fix isn't a better idea. It's more bets and more discipline at the same time.
There are two ways corporates usually get this wrong.
The first is the Single Big Bet. Leadership picks the "best" idea, points all the resources at it, and everyone quietly prays it works. It feels decisive. Confident. Like leadership.
It's actually the riskiest thing you can do, because a single bet is a single point of failure. And when it doesn't work (most don't), the whole program loses credibility. Worse, because you can't afford to let your one bet die, you protect it long past the point of reason. That's how zombie ventures are born.
The second is Spray and Pray. A dozen half-funded ventures, none with real resources behind them. Teams working side-of-desk. No clear bar for what success looks like. Everyone's busy. Nothing breaks through. The portfolio becomes a graveyard of slow deaths.
The answer is in between. And it borrows directly from how VCs and startups actually think.
In venture, failure is the default outcome. It's a game of outliers. So you don't try to engineer a world where every bet wins. You generate a lot of bets, run cheap experiments, and let evidence surface the few that deserve real money. Then you triple down on those.
Corporates do the opposite. Failure is treated as a non-starter, because of how it’s perceived internally. So you run only a few projects, then bury them in approval gates and governance to "de-risk" them. It's backwards. The fewer bets you have, the more you cling to each one, and the harder it is to ever say no.
Here's the math we use:
That's not pessimism. That's the shape of the thing. If you want one venture that matters, you need a lot more at the top than feels comfortable.
We experienced this while building a venture studio with RBC . Five years, from designing the operating model to scale. Hundreds of ideas tested and invalidated. Plenty of hard lessons (holding onto things too long was a big one). The portfolio is what made it work. Not a single hero project. A system that kept concepts moving through every stage at all times:
So here's the question: how many real bets does your innovation program have running right now? If the answer is one, or if it's twelve but none of them are actually funded, you already know where this is going.
Volume and discipline aren't opposites. They're partners. More on that in the next post in this series, where we’ll get into why measurement is the thing that makes the discipline possible.
