Many corporate innovation units don't survive a change in CEO.
LG Nova just crossed five years, through four ventures, under a leader who says it comes down to one thing: P&L, the only thing that doesn't change, regardless who your leader is. Everything else — pilots, culture, capability building — gets reinterpreted by whoever's in charge next.
For teams without a P&L to point at, anchor the work to conversations every leader already understands: growth targets at risk, revenue plans built on untested assumptions, rollout timelines that depend on conditions nobody has checked.
This week’s edition is all about surviving scrutiny — making the case that holds up to a new CEO, a skeptical board, or anyone asking what this innovation actually produces.
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
Own the P&L (Or Get Shut Down When the CEO Changes)
Sokwoo Rhee has run LG Nova for five years — longer than most corporate innovation units survive. His explanation isn't culture or timing. It's math: “The only thing that doesn't change, regardless who your leader is, is P&L.”
Many corporate innovation units don't make it past three years. They launch with a mandate that sounds durable — pilots, capability building, strategic optionality — until the executive who signed off on it leaves, and the next one reads that same mandate completely differently.
LG Nova was built specifically to not depend on that read: ventures deliberately outside LG's core hardware business, a ring-fenced budget, external investors with their own fund, and a 12-month incubation process that requires commercial evidence at every gate. Four ventures have launched so far, spanning rural healthcare to data center energy to mental health to AI marketing, each with its own P&L.
Here’s a look at LG Nova’s full model: how the unit was designed, how the incubation funnel works, what the four ventures are actually doing in market, and why AI compression is raising the bar for every corporate innovation team still justifying itself on soft metrics.
Talk Growth, Not Innovation
A standalone P&L only works if you're running something with its own customers and cost base to begin with. Most innovation teams aren't.
Their job is to help existing business units hit growth targets those units already own, which means a separate P&L isn't the right structure, or even an option.
Frank Mattes has spent decades sitting in on growth reviews at industrial companies. All of them shared the same problems: a pilot that worked beautifully, under conditions the rollout plan can't reproduce; a sales team that loves the new product over coffee but keeps selling the old one, because the incentives reward it; users who are enthusiastic, but turn out to have zero budget authority.
His argument? Stop talking about innovation and start talking about growth. When you're the team that spots the cracks in the growth plan, every incoming leader wants you in the room, regardless of how they feel about innovation.
The Radical Bet Survey: 59% Want It, 16% Fund It
Cambridge Consultants surveyed 750 senior leaders for its Deep Tech Index 2026. 59% of CXOs picked radical innovation as the type that excites them most. When asked what actually gets funded, the weighted average allocating more than 70% of their innovation budget to radical bets was 15.7%.
The interviews point to timing as the culprit, not appetite. A CBO at a global automotive manufacturer said the fastest way to kill an innovation is to ask for a five-year ROI forecast at gate one. Multiple interviewees confirmed boards typically cap investment horizons at 18 to 24 months, tied to product delivery milestones, even in sectors where the real payback takes decades.
As such, ROI and payback "are only useful once an innovation is established. Applied too early to a breakthrough bet, they kill radical innovation before it has a chance to live."
Most organizations still evaluate radical bets with tools built for incremental ones: ROI, payback period, revenue from recently launched products. The report's suggested alternative is to track leading indicators instead. Speed from concept to working prototype. The number of parallel experiments running rather than a single sequential bet. What was learned from a project that got killed, logged as a result rather than written off as nothing.
That's it for this week.
If any of this maps onto a fight you're currently having internally, I'd like to hear about it.
Next week, we’ll look how a Spanish hotel chain redesigned its innovation operating model three times in 12 years. Each time, the structure that had just delivered results couldn't handle the next level of scope. Sounds familiar?
Hans
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
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