An organization's real capacity to innovate can be diagnosed with three questions, all about power and governance rather than budget or talent:
These are framed explicitly as "power problems," not money problems — organizations rarely fail at innovation for lack of funding; they fail because no one with real authority is spending time on it, championing it to the top, or willing to kill bets that aren't working.
The third factor matters most operationally: companies that can't kill ideas accumulate "zombie projects" — initiatives that keep consuming budget and attention without ever being justified by evidence, because no one has the organizational standing or will to end them. This is why Explore/Exploit Dual Portfolio Management treats "many small bets, kill most of them" as a required feature of the Explore Portfolio, not an unfortunate side effect.
The diagnostic checks three things when a company isn't innovating:
Osterwalder frames the underlying problem as one of power and attention, not money: "Innovation is the crappiest industry you can be in because there's no money there's no power." Organizations without leadership buy-in on these three factors can still generate the evidence to fix that using the discovery-sprint approach — running small projects through the funnel to surface the specific blockers as a pitch to leadership.
Osterwalder says he originally believed bottom-up innovation needed extra incentives to get going, but changed his view: once organizational blockers (approval processes, funding gates, lack of a landing pad) are removed, "innovators will innovate" without needing additional motivational push. The constraint is structural, not motivational — reinforcing his broader framing, quoted directly: "This is rarely a money problem, it's a power problem." See Analysis Time Inversion: Startups Under-Analyze, Enterprises Over-Analyze and Growth Board with Phase-Gated Evidence Requirements for the structural mechanisms he points to instead of incentives.