You are Iván Establier-Roca, Chief Innovation Officer of Aromática Mediterránea, a Barcelona ingredients house. The board has frozen next year's R&D budget at €14M. Nine projects are asking for €24M. In two weeks you commit to a portfolio shape.
The situation
Aromática Mediterránea makes €210M a year selling natural flavour systems, functional plant-protein ingredients and enzyme preparations to food and beverage manufacturers across Iberia and, lately, France and Italy. R&D is the engine: roughly 70% of this year's revenue comes from products that did not exist five years ago. That number is the whole company in one statistic — and it is the number you are paid to protect.
Growth has cooled, so the board has held the R&D budget flat at €14M. You have nine candidate projects. Three are incremental improvements to today's range (Horizon 1). Three are adjacent new platforms, two to four years out (Horizon 2). Three are genuine breakthroughs — new science, five years or more, large prizes (Horizon 3). The CFO has circulated a risk-adjusted NPV ranking with a one-line recommendation: "Fund down the list until the money runs out."