This City Accelerator Guide for Embedding Innovation in Local Government says surprisingly little. However, one thing caught my eye:

The innovation team should run a large number of projects in order to sustain a robust pipeline. It is unknown which innovations will be successful and which ones won’t, so the team always needs to be building plenty of partnerships and pursuing many pilots. Having many irons in the fire ensures that regardless of whether projects succeed or fail, there are always new innovations in development. In some ways this may happen naturally, given the “stretched-thin” nature of local government teams, but a little extra nudge here and there can really help keep things moving. It is also important to think strategically about the range of projects we are engaged in from the perspective of a portfolio so that we can manage risk and reward effectively.

Does this mean your innovation team is running a pyramid scheme, constantly starting more projects every day than it can finish, so that the whole thing collapses under its own weight? Well, the advice there is “most projects won’t need to have a high level of polish until they are quite advanced, and only a subset of projects will reach that stage.” So, I guess you take a large number of small risks, loudly publicize the successes, and let the failures die a quiet death.