Innovation governance: Why every CEO needs a Growth Board

In a world marked by uncertainty, acceleration, and disruption, a new responsibility rests on the CEO’s shoulders. Not just to lead the company, but to future-proof it. Innovation is no longer optional, it’s a strategic imperative. This blog series (and accompanying FAQ) translates the RevelX CEO Innovation Guide into practical insights and action steps for every CEO and Managing Director.

1. Why Innovation belongs on the CEO agenda
2. Innovation governance: Why every CEO needs a Growth Board
3. Step 1: Why every CEO should play the DisruptR game with their team
4. From chaos to capability: Why every CEO Needs to implement an Innovation Target Operating Model (iTOM)
5. The CEO innovation Q&A: Everything a leader needs to know about innovation

Innovation doesn’t just need ideas, it needs decisions. Smart, timely, and well-informed decisions. Yet too often, innovation efforts stall not due to a lack of creativity, but because there’s no clear governance in place to guide them forward. That’s why leading companies are embracing Growth Boards as the heartbeat of innovation decision making. A Growth Board for CEOs is no longer a luxury—it’s a strategic necessity. It empowers CEOs to make bolder bets while de-risking corporate innovation.

Traditional organizations often make innovation decisions based on gut feeling, political influence, or legacy thinking. This leads to inconsistent prioritization, risk-averse behavior, and stalled initiatives. In contrast, best-in-class innovators use structured, data-informed governance to manage their innovation funnel, from ideation to scale-up.

Enter the Growth Board for CEOs: a cross-functional leadership group that reviews innovation progress, allocates funding, and ensures strategic alignment.

A Growth Board is not a typical steering committee. It’s a small group of empowered leaders, often including the CEO, innovation lead, finance, operations, and business unit heads, who are collectively responsible for guiding innovation projects through their lifecycle.

Key responsibilities include:

• Stage gate decisions: Stop, pivot, or double down on innovation initiatives
• Portfolio oversight: Ensure a healthy balance across innovation horizons
• Funding: Approve budgets through a “metered funding” model
• Removing roadblocks: Tackle the organizational obstacles that slow down progress
• Ambassadorship: Drive innovation culture and ownership throughout the business

The power of a Growth Board lies in its approach. Here’s how to ensure yours drives real value:

1. Focus on learning, not only results

Don’t kill projects too early because they don’t yet show ROI. Instead, ask: “What have we learned? What assumptions have we validated or disproven?”

In the early stages, the primary currency of progress is learning, not revenue.

2. Growth Boards for CEOs need to be cross-functional

Include voices from across the organization, strategy, marketing, tech, finance. Innovation doesn’t live in a silo, and decisions shouldn’t either.

3. Base decisions on data, not opinions

Use lean startup methods to gather evidence. Ask for metrics on desirability, feasibility, and viability and make that the standard for progression.

4. Fund like a VC

Adopt a metered funding approach. Allocate smaller budgets in early stages to encourage fast learning. Increase investment only as evidence builds. This reduces risk and increases discipline.

Even with good intentions, innovation governance can go wrong. Be aware of:

• Over-reliance on seniority instead of insight and data
• Slow, consensus-driven decision making
• Anchoring bias: letting legacy ideas dominate discussions
• Killing ideas too soon based on traditional KPIs

To avoid these traps, train Growth Board members on innovation-specific decision principles and common cognitive biases.

Done right, governance doesn’t slow down innovation, it speeds it up. A strong Growth Board makes it easier to say yes to the right ideas and no to distractions. It reduces friction, aligns efforts with strategy, and gives innovation teams the clarity and confidence they need to execute.

As CEO, you set the tone. If you want innovation to scale, you need to govern it seriously, with the same rigor and cadence as your core business. A Growth Board is your first step.

Curious how to set up an effective Growth Board in your company? We’d love to show you how. Get in touch with RevelX for a working session or diagnostic.