In most companies, “risk” is a red flag. But for innovation leaders like Alice Ponti, it’s the starting point.
Ponti spent decades leading strategy and innovation at global consumer brands including L’Oréal, Diageo, and AB InBev. She’s launched products across continents, overhauled portfolios, and learned firsthand what causes corporate innovation to stall. Today, she’s the SVP of Innovation and Strategy at VentureFuel, where she helps Fortune 500 companies tap into startup ecosystems to de-risk their R&D efforts and accelerate growth.
In Episode 9 of Faces of Innovation, she offers a blunt but deeply experienced take: corporate innovation can’t rely on traditional playbooks anymore. Companies need new strategies, new structures, and new kinds of talent if they want to compete in a landscape defined by speed, optionality, and disruption.
Here’s what stood out.
Most leadership teams know that innovation is risky. But they still behave as if success is guaranteed.
Alice calls this “a kind of collective amnesia.” Even when teams know 90% of projects won’t make it to market, they set goals and KPIs that assume otherwise.
The result?
The true danger, Alice argues, isn’t failure.
It’s the failure to recognize where disruption is actually happening—and respond fast enough.
“There’s actually a greater risk in not tackling your core business and future-proofing that, than there is in launching innovation on the side.”
— Alice Ponti
Executives often frame innovation as the riskiest part of their business. Ponti argues the opposite: the bigger risk is letting the core business run on autopilot while the market changes around you.
Too many teams treat innovation like a side bet or a P&L filler. But that mindset ignores the more existential risk—what happens when consumer behavior changes faster than your roadmap, or when a new player redefines the category?
“Often, the greater risk is in not tackling your core business and future-proofing it,” Ponti says.
Without innovation, your company isn’t just stagnating. It’s giving space for someone else to take your place.
If you’re still managing breakthrough innovation with a rigid stage-gate process, you’re setting your teams up to fail. Ponti breaks it down clearly: traditional stage-gates work well for incremental moves, like a new flavor of an existing product. But for category-creating or model-breaking ideas? They’re too slow, too linear, and too inflexible.
Here’s why:
Instead, Ponti calls for more entrepreneurial, lean testing in early stages—with smart pilots and measured risk-taking as the project matures.
Ponti shares how leading organizations are evolving toward a portfolio-based risk model. Instead of betting everything on one big innovation, they build a mix of projects—some close to the core, some adjacent, and some breakthrough.
To do this well, companies are:
That pilot-first mindset gives innovation teams room to iterate. It also gives leadership real-world data before investing in full-scale rollouts.
Innovation doesn’t come from process alone. It comes from people who are empowered to move fast, think independently, and challenge assumptions.
Ponti describes running quarterly “growth board” meetings that gave leadership space to evaluate innovation progress without killing momentum too early. These sessions were coached on both sides: teams learned how to frame risk, and executives learned how to ask the right questions at the right time.
When innovation is visible and supported, it changes how other teams work. They get braver, faster, more curious. But this only happens when innovation teams are protected from misaligned expectations, rigid processes, and outdated evaluation frameworks.
Corporate innovators need a new playbook. And they need the leadership, structure, and talent to run it.
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