Hi,

There are few emails that create quite as much joy in an innovation project as this one:

“Your proposal has been approved.”

Especially after a demanding evaluation process.

Months of preparation. Questions from evaluators. Partner discussions. Revisions. Waiting.

And then finally, approval.

Of course you celebrate.

After months of trying to get a yes, asking whether we should now say no feels almost absurd.

But there is one question we rarely ask at that moment:

Does this project still make as much sense today as it did when we submitted it?

That matters because innovation projects live in a moving world.

Markets change. Technology evolves. Competitors move. Organisational priorities shift. Sometimes the original opportunity becomes weaker. Sometimes a much better one appears. Innovation plans therefore need to be revisited when reality changes.

Yet once funding has been approved, the decision somehow feels final.

Approval tells you that the project passed the evaluation. It does not tell you that the world stood still while it was being evaluated.

There is also a very human trap involved.

By the time approval arrives, months of effort may already have gone into the proposal. Partners are committed. Expectations have been created. Walking away can feel like wasting everything that came before.

That is sunk cost thinking.

Sunk cost thinking focuses our attention on what we have already invested. Opportunity cost asks what else we could do with the resources we still have.

The work already invested is gone either way.

The decision you face today is about the value you can still create from this point onward.

And funding does not remove that decision.

Even a generously funded innovation project still consumes your own resources:

• your financial contribution
• the time of key people
• management attention
• capacity that cannot be used elsewhere

That last one is easy to overlook.

Funding can reduce the cost of a project. It does not remove the opportunity cost of doing it.

This is where innovation portfolio management matters. Projects should not only be evaluated when they enter the portfolio. Their strategic relevance needs to be reconsidered as the context changes. That ongoing reassessment is part of managing innovation as a system.

So before automatically launching an approved project, I think there is value in asking three uncomfortable questions:

1. Are the assumptions that justified this project still valid?
2. Is the expected value still worth the resources we need to commit?
3. Knowing what we know today, would we still choose to invest these people, this money and this attention here?

If the answer is yes, celebrate the approval and move.

If the answer is no, stopping may feel painful.

But continuing simply because the funding has arrived can be much more expensive.

Sometimes good innovation portfolio management is not about deciding what to start next.

It is about having the courage to revisit what you already decided.

Warm regards,

Piet V.

P.S. The hardest moment to question a project may be exactly when everyone else is celebrating its approval.