You're not building an innovation pipeline; you're sealing yourself in a tunnel out of options.

When you build an innovation pipeline, you’re often confusing linear efficiency with strategic agility. Innovation isn’t a 100% controlled flow; it’s an ongoing negotiation with uncertainty. Pipelines assume you already know the destination, which means you've pre-killed any chance to pivot, adapt, or discover radically better opportunities along the way.

Worse, you're building into your culture the necessity of "being right" and betting on the "best" projects ahead of time, which, on average, no one can really achieve, and certainly not when chaos will reign in the market for the foreseeable future.

This is why three years later, your innovation program underdelivers (I'm being polite) and suddenly the person in charge is promoted to another part of the company.

Rinse and repeat.