A portfolio strategy is a growth strategy that improves the odds of success by investing in multiple opportunities with different risk and return profiles, and actively removing the unsuccessful or less attractive ones as early as possible in their investment cycle. Its central premise — Pipeline ≠ Portfolio — is that moving opportunities through stages (the pipeline, a process) is not the same as deciding which opportunities to run, in what mix, against what objective (the portfolio, an intentional distribution of risk with strategic intent). A portfolio concentrates investment behind the strongest bets and limits exposure on the rest; the resulting funnel, in which most projects never reach launch, is a designed feature, not a sign of failure.
In BRI Associates' methodology a portfolio is composed of project classes — commonly Core, Adjacent, and Disruptive Innovation — whose mix is set to match a defined growth objective, and whose evaluation criteria, evidence standards, and survival rates are configurable per portfolio and per class. Designing that configuration is, in substance, the design of an alternative governance model. Portfolio strategy is operationalized in Growth Forge® Software through its portfolio-modeling and performance-management tools. For the full treatment, see the Portfolio Management pillar at /supporting/portfolio-management. Related Terminology Index entries: Core Innovation; Adjacent Innovation; Disruptive Innovation; Portfolio Mix; Survival Rate; Pipeline.
