Collection of innovation initiatives with high uncertainty and learning focus.
The Explore Portfolio bundles all innovation initiatives that operate under high uncertainty and are primarily oriented toward learning. It contains experiments, prototypes, and new business model hypotheses whose outcomes are open. In contrast to the Exploit Portfolio, which optimizes existing business models, the Explore Portfolio aims at discovering future sources of growth.
Explore initiatives follow a different logic than the core business: instead of detailed business plans, they work with hypotheses and experiments. Instead of revenue forecasts, learning progress and validated assumptions are used as measures of advancement. Amazon Web Services began as an internal Explore project that offered infrastructure capacity externally, eventually developing into the corporation’s most profitable division. Most Explore initiatives fail, however, and that is part of the model: from many small bets, a few large successes emerge.
What is decisive for a functioning Explore Portfolio is separation from the control mechanisms of the core business. Anyone who evaluates Explore initiatives by the same KPIs as the existing business will systematically terminate them too early or never start them at all.
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