Innovation Pyramid
The Innovation Pyramid sorts innovation effort into three tiers, incremental at the base, platform in the middle, breakthrough at the top, so you can see whether your pipeline is too safe or too thin.
Three bands stack up, a wide base of incremental work narrowing toward a thin peak of breakthrough bets.
Reach for this when…
- All your innovation budget goes to small tweaks and nothing genuinely new gets funded.
- One big bet is swallowing the whole innovation budget with no smaller wins alongside it.
- You need to show the board where the innovation spend is actually going.
How to run it
- List current and proposed innovation work.
- Sort each into incremental, platform, or breakthrough.
- Check the split: a healthy pipeline usually runs roughly 70/20/10 across the tiers.
- Fund each tier with a different risk tolerance and time horizon.
- Rebalance deliberately if one tier is starving the others.
A worked example
Situation. Dawit Bekele was operations director at Abyssinia Forge, a mining equipment manufacturer in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Applied. He mapped the 2025 R&D list onto the pyramid: eleven incremental tweaks to existing drill parts, one platform project, a shared sensor module across three product lines, and nothing at the breakthrough tier.
Result. He redirected a slice of the incremental budget to fund one breakthrough project, a remote-monitoring system, so the company wasn't entirely reliant on small wins.
The catch
The tiers invite false precision, plenty of work sits between incremental and platform and arguing over which box it belongs in wastes the meeting. It also assumes you can predict a project's ambition before you've started it, which breakthrough work rarely allows. Use it to check balance across the year, not to sort every individual project.
A pyramid with nothing at the top isn't cautious, it's a business betting its future entirely on today's product.