As an innovation strategy consultant, we helped a renewable energy company evaluate its entire innovation portfolio against five structured criteria in a 15-week engagement — improving investment allocation efficiency by 37% and cutting duplicate initiatives by 22%, without reducing the number of ideas in play.
The Paradox of Too Many Good Ideas
During a period of sustained growth, this renewable energy company had invested heavily across 4 categories of initiative — research partnerships, digital initiatives, sustainability programmes and product development. Individual projects showed real promise.
Collectively, they lacked a coherent strategic direction. Business units pursued innovation independently, investment priorities shifted frequently, and executives struggled to distinguish meaningful opportunities from well-intentioned experimentation. The company had no shortage of ideas. What it lacked was a framework for deciding which ideas deserved to become part of its future.
Five Questions Instead of a Hundred Opinions
Working alongside executive leadership, we evaluated every active initiative through the lens of commercial value rather than technical ambition, using five structured questions applied consistently across all 4 initiative categories:
- Would it strengthen the organisation's long-term competitive position?
- Could it be commercially scaled?
- Did it solve a clearly defined customer problem?
- Would it improve operational capability?
- Could the business realistically execute it within existing strategic priorities?
From Competing for Funding to a Shared Framework
Several highly visible projects generated considerable internal enthusiasm but offered limited commercial potential. Conversely, a number of less prominent initiatives demonstrated significantly greater scalability and strategic relevance once measured against the same five questions.
Leadership replaced departmental competition for funding with a structured innovation governance model.
- Resources became concentrated around initiatives capable of delivering measurable commercial outcomes.
- Lower-priority experiments were either postponed or intentionally discontinued rather than left to run indefinitely.
- Innovation discussions became shorter and more focused because every proposal entered the same evaluation framework.
Our Methodology
This engagement followed our five-phase innovation strategy framework — Discovery & Portfolio Mapping, Commercial Value Assessment, Governance Criteria Design, Portfolio Rebalancing, and Validation & Handover — applied across 4 initiative categories over 15 weeks.
Five named deliverables anchored the portfolio redesign:
- Innovation Portfolio Audit — inventorying every active initiative across research, digital, sustainability and product development against commercial value, not novelty.
- Five-Criteria Evaluation Framework — the common language of long-term position, scalability, customer problem, operational capability and executability used for every funding decision.
- Innovation Governance Charter — replacing department-versus-department funding competition with one shared model.
- Portfolio Rebalancing Roadmap — sequencing which initiatives scaled, paused or stopped.
- Investment Confidence Scorecard — tracking capital concentration against strategic alignment over time.
Each deliverable fed directly into which initiatives kept funding and which didn’t, so every investment decision traced back to the same five documented questions rather than internal enthusiasm or seniority.
What Changed in the First 12 Months
Within months of implementation:
- Investment allocation efficiency improved by approximately 37% as capital concentrated around initiatives with the strongest alignment to long-term objectives.
- Duplicate innovation initiatives were reduced by roughly 22%, as overlapping projects across business units were consolidated or discontinued.
- Innovation discussions became shorter and more productive because every proposal entered the same five-question framework.
- Investment approvals accelerated through the structured evaluation criteria instead of case-by-case debate.
- Employees stopped believing innovation required constant reinvention, recognising it as solving the right problem with greater clarity.
The result was not fewer ideas. It was better decisions.
Our Perspective
Innovation is frequently described as the engine of growth. In reality, direction is.
Ideas become valuable only when organisations possess the discipline to choose which ones deserve their attention, investment and leadership focus.
That discipline shows up in the data too: BCG’s 2025 Most Innovative Companies analysis, spanning 20 years of data, found no consistent link between R&D spending and shareholder return — the top 50 most innovative companies outperformed the market by an average of 2.4 percentage points annually not by spending more, but by choosing which bets to make and which to stop.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did having too many good ideas actually hurt this company’s innovation results?
Resources became fragmented across research partnerships, digital initiatives, sustainability programmes and product development because every initiative received roughly equal attention. Individual projects showed promise, but collectively they lacked a coherent strategic direction, which made investment decisions increasingly difficult to justify.
Why five questions instead of a longer or more technical scoring model?
Five questions — long-term competitive position, commercial scalability, a defined customer problem, operational capability improvement, and realistic executability — were deliberately simple enough that every business unit could apply them consistently, replacing subjective debates about technical impressiveness with a shared, repeatable standard.
What happened to projects that scored well internally but poorly against the framework?
Several highly visible projects that generated internal enthusiasm scored poorly on commercial potential and were postponed or discontinued, while less prominent initiatives that scored well on scalability and customer relevance received concentrated investment instead.
How did governance stop departments from competing against each other for funding?
Every proposed initiative, regardless of which business unit it came from, was evaluated against the same five questions rather than departmental advocacy or seniority — which replaced funding competition with one shared framework everyone could see and understand.
What was the measurable outcome of restructuring the innovation portfolio?
Investment allocation efficiency improved by approximately 37%, duplicate innovation initiatives dropped by roughly 22%, and investment approvals accelerated because every proposal now moved through the same structured evaluation criteria.
What methodology did we use to restructure a 4-category innovation portfolio?
We applied a five-phase innovation strategy framework — Discovery & Portfolio Mapping, Commercial Value Assessment, Governance Criteria Design, Portfolio Rebalancing, and Validation & Handover — across research partnerships, digital initiatives, sustainability programmes and product development over 15 weeks.
Work With an Innovation Strategy Consultant
Businesses rarely struggle because they lack creativity. They struggle because they invest in too many disconnected opportunities without a clear strategic direction.
