We are going to treat this as a portfolio management problem. Thirty percent is a significant allocation and we need a governance structure that ensures it is deployed with the same rigour we apply to the core business — clear hypotheses, defined success metrics, stage-gate reviews, and accountability for outcomes. Innovation theatre is expensive and demoralising. We are defining what we mean by "innovation" precisely before we spend a dollar, and we are measuring ROI from day one, even if the time horizon is longer than our operational metrics.

We do not need the board to tell us to innovate — we are already running dozens of experiments across the organisation. What we need from this allocation is to remove the friction points that slow down the edges: faster approval for small bets, dedicated time for teams to pursue ideas that do not fit neatly into quarterly plans, and a clear signal to our people that exploring is part of the job. Thirty percent as a central fund risks creating an innovation department that the rest of the organisation resents. We want it distributed.

This is the conversation we have been waiting to have. We are going to propose a rigorous framework for how this capital gets deployed — not a slush fund, but a structured hypothesis-testing engine. We want to see at least twenty distinct experiments in the first year, with clear learning objectives and decision criteria for each. The goal is not to generate innovations; it is to generate better decisions about where to invest next. The board should expect most of these bets to fail — that is not a sign the process is broken, it is how the process works.

We have concerns about this that we need to raise at the next board meeting. Thirty percent is a very large number. We are not opposed to innovation, but we have seen too many organisations damage their core while chasing adjacencies that never materialised. We want to understand what problem the board is actually trying to solve — is this about growth, about defensive positioning, or about signalling to investors? The answer changes what the right response looks like. We are proposing to start with ten percent in ring-fenced pilots with quarterly reviews before committing to thirty.