Risk is inherent in innovation. It should not be denied or avoided. Indeed the innovation process could be viewed as a series of activities designed to assimilate information, linked by decision points at which management have to either increase their stake or abandon the project. However, although risk management is intrinsic to innovation, it is seldom explicit. This attitude was common in project management in general but it has changed in recent years with a huge growth in project risk management. Surely the concepts and tools of project risk management should be ideally suited to innovation management? But there could be a danger: although innovation can be viewed as a project it does have several special characteristics. In particular, creativity is often claimed to be critical in the initial stages of innovation and this might be stifled by too much, formal risk management. A company edict that requires that any new proposals to be accompanied by a rigorous quantitative risk analysis may well provoke the justifiable protest that the data are not available. Radical ideas might be discouraged in favour of the more evolutionary proposals: formal risk management could stifle innovation. However, perhaps there is a balance. Project risk management may well be valuable at certain stages of the innovation process and if it is carefully deployed it might help prevent some costly failures and help direct the innovation activities. This study explores the attitudes towards risk in innovation in a number of companies from diverse industries and the potential for integrating the concepts of project risk management into the innovation process.