黑料吃瓜

As a writer, there鈥檚 nothing worse than having a deadline while staring blankly at a page trying not to panic as the ever-dreaded 鈥渨riter鈥檚 block鈥� sets in and threatens to ruin you. It doesn鈥檛 just happen to writers either. Every profession has its own special version of 鈥渟tuck.鈥� With all the complexities that come with innovation management, there are so many moving parts it鈥檚 easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you don鈥檛 have a sound plan on how to be successful. 

We鈥檒l help guide you through how to get the words on the page and get you 鈥淯Nstuck鈥� before the glue dries and you鈥檙e solidified in the spot you鈥檙e currently at. 

Managing enterprise innovation is a uniquely challenging task: you鈥檙e walking a tightrope between sustaining forward momentum and adhering to stringent project deadlines, while maintaining a flexible pipeline that can rapidly adapt to shifting priorities. The desire to embrace bold risks and explore unconventional ideas constantly needs to be counterbalanced by the responsibility to manage budgets and hit revenue targets.

This tension creates a demanding environment for innovation managers. They鈥檙e under pressure to deliver tangible results and meet stakeholder expectations. But the very nature of innovation processes can often feel unpredictable and vague. The enterprise's financial stability hinges on anticipated product launch timelines, which can be disrupted by the uncertainty and potential setbacks characteristic of innovation.

Innovation often involves navigating uncharted territory, where the path forward isn鈥檛 entirely clear. This ambiguity can be unsettling for many organizations. The need to reconcile the unpredictable nature of innovation with the structured demands of the enterprise can create a sense of dissonance and tension for innovation management.

Growth innovation brings all of these areas into alignment. Your innovation pipeline can be pliable and predictable. You can boost revenue now while taking strategic, innovative swings. You can know where every active project is and when they will cross the finish line. Growth innovation is the key to unlocking innovation鈥檚 black box problem. 

What is growth innovation?

Growth innovation is a management philosophy that prioritizes growth as innovation鈥檚 most critical outcome. However, it鈥檚 more than just a growth plan meant to increase revenue. A growth innovation strategy also helps you set innovation priorities and initiatives, allocate resources, and establish reporting protocols, giving stakeholders the information they need to keep the pipeline running smoothly. 

Your growth innovation strategy will connect the dots between your innovation portfolio and the enterprise鈥檚 growth objectives, ensuring that your efforts always align with those goals. This is centered around three basic principles: 

1. Growth
   By establishing a direct correlation between innovation initiatives and organizational revenue goals, projects aren鈥檛 disconnected from corporate objectives. Every innovation initiative is centered around hitting targets and contributing to organizational growth.
2. Visibility
   There are stakeholders within and outside the innovation bubble, and their decisions are driven by various data points (resource allocation, project management data, timelines, process interdependencies, performance metrics, etc.). When everyone has access to the data they need, they鈥檙e equipped to address potential problems before things get off track鈥攐r grind to a halt entirely.
3. Orchestration
   Traditional innovation management can obscure the interdependencies of your numerous initiatives and the ripple effects of various decisions and actions throughout the innovation process. Growth innovation ensures that each project is aligned with the entire portfolio and scales up to meet organizational growth and revenue objectives. 

A functional growth innovation strategy relies on six key disciplines to put these principles into play, and the PROPER disciplines are:

Why do I need a growth innovation strategy?

Anyone managing innovation has already developed a process that works for them in some capacity. As you read through this, you鈥檒l likely think, 鈥淚 understand these principles, and I do a lot of this intuitively.鈥� That鈥檚 probably true, but think of this moment as an opportunity to be a self-disrupter and not constrain yourself by what you already know.

Even if you have these steps perfectly crystallized in your head, documenting them can make a critical difference to your organization. Writing it down helps you formulate a system that allows for consistency鈥攊t gives you a process you can fine-tune. It also enables you to communicate it to the people who need to be aligned with your strategy. It goes from being a nebulous concept to a simple guideline. 

Your growth innovation strategy will help you:

• Provide clear direction for your team
  This strategy becomes a north star, aligning everyone鈥檚 efforts toward the same goals and ensuring everyone knows their role and how they contribute to the big picture. 

• Justify your decisions
  A documented strategy creates a solid rationale for your targets, initiatives, priorities, and resource allocation decisions. 

• Encourage collaboration
  Growth innovation breaks down silos, inviting input from executives and cross-functional teams. This input helps ensure that your innovation processes receive the most insightful input from critical stakeholders. 
• Optimize around controllable factors
  By identifying and prioritizing the elements you can manage, you can proactively regulate risks and seize growth opportunities. Actively governing controllable factors ultimately increases the factors that are governable. 
• Quickly describe the implications of ad-hoc changes
  Growth innovation enables you to recognize the interdependencies of your portfolio and quickly summarize how changes to one project will impact the others. 
• Facilitate strategic trade-offs
  Managing innovation requires making tough choices. A growth innovation strategy enables you to evaluate options tactically and make prioritization and allocation decisions easier. 

Creating a growth innovation strategy is a big deal, but putting it together doesn鈥檛 have to be. You can accomplish it by dedicating a few hours a month. Once you wrap your head around it, you can map it out on a whiteboard and communicate it easily鈥攁nd it can fit on a single page!    

Creating your growth innovation strategy 

This process for crafting your innovation strategy is straightforward and made up of four distinct steps:

1. Define the enterprise鈥檚 growth objectives
2. Summarize your current innovation portfolio
3. Craft your theory of the case for growth innovation
4. Audit current innovation resource allocation

STEP 1: Define the enterprise鈥檚 growth objectives 

While specific growth objectives can differ between organizations, two fundamental elements remain consistent:

• Revenue: The income targets the enterprise is aiming for.

• Timelines: The strategic timeframes for completing projects and hitting revenue targets.

These objectives fall into a couple of categories:

1. Known objectives: These are explicitly stated and can be found in various sources such as strategic documents, shareholder calls, and analyst reports.
2. Extrapolated objectives: These are inferred or projected based on available information. They can be further categorized into:
   1. Based on historical trends: These objectives are derived from analyzing past performance and growth patterns.
   2. Based on expected future events: These objectives are formulated by considering anticipated events and their potential impact on the organization's growth.

Start by gathering the enterprise鈥檚 known objectives for the next five years. If a gap exists between the organization鈥檚 defined goals and the five-year mark, put together projected objectives based on historical data and any upcoming critical factors (regulatory changes, economic shifts, socio-political cycles, upcoming opportunities, etc.).

Identify revenue streams 

The revenue targets you set in the time horizons will come from one of three streams:

1. Current: The existing revenue streams currently generating income for the business

2. Planned: New revenue streams that the business plans to introduce in the future

3. Candidate: Potential revenue streams that are being explored or considered for future development

Identify time horizons 

Now, lay out a timeline for revenue streams over specific time horizons: short-term (usually years 0鈥�2), medium-term (usually years 3鈥�4), and long-term (year 5 and beyond). Your specific time horizons should reflect industry, business cycle, and strategic goals.

Identify revenue targets 

Next, lay out the income numbers the enterprise is aiming for, and map those to the revenue streams that are expected to supply that income.  

When you鈥檙e finished with this step, you should have:

• Defined or projected enterprise goals for the next five years
• The revenue streams responsible for achieving those targets 

STEP 2: Compile a comprehensive summary of your current innovation portfolio

Now that you have a firmer grasp of your organization鈥檚 objectives and revenue targets, it鈥檚 time to get a handle on your current, planned, and candidate revenue streams. This means creating a comprehensive inventory of four distinct areas: 

• Active new products: All new products currently generating revenue
• Active NPD pipeline: New products currently in development
• Planned NPD Pipeline: New products scheduled for development
• Front-end project portfolio: Early-stage product concepts and ideas

These sources can be segmented by revenue streams and individual projects鈥攐r whatever segmentation most logically maps to the enterprise objectives you identified in Step 1. For each segment, you鈥檒l need to gather the following information:

• Best-case, worst-case, and most-likely scenarios
• Projected revenue from each revenue stream
• Projected timelines for that revenue

STEP 3: Craft your theory of the case for growth innovation

The first two steps laid the groundwork for this stage of the process. This is where you begin directly linking innovation projects and initiatives to enterprise objectives. 

Map innovation projects to revenue streams

The innovation projects in the pipeline (along with the planned and front-end projects) that you identified in Step 2 need to be linked to the time horizon revenue streams from Step 1. Everything in the innovation portfolio should be tied to a measurable projected impact on the company's financial goals.

Group innovation projects based on the overarching business objectives they support, so you have a clear alignment between project outcomes and strategic priorities.

Assuming all other growth factors remain constant, determine what innovation needs to do to meet the enterprise growth objectives. Set specific, measurable targets for innovation outcomes to enable the company to reach these goals. 

Part of this process involves identifying and documenting key assumptions underpinning the projected performance of innovation projects. These include assumptions about customer behavior, market trends, technological changes, and the competitive landscape. Have these assumptions been tested and validated through market research, customer feedback, and other analyses? Has enough rigor been dedicated to this analysis to ensure confidence in these assumptions? 

Compare innovation needs against the current innovation portfolio

Now you can begin examining where you鈥檙e on course to meet objectives, and identify any problem areas. This is achieved by scrutinizing three specific areas:

1. On-track projects: These are goals with planned revenue streams supported by innovation projects whose projections are in line with those goals.
2. Revenue gaps (innovation performance issues): Identify areas where planned revenue streams have supporting innovation projects, but those projects are not projected to generate sufficient revenue to meet enterprise objectives.
3. Portfolio gaps (missing innovation initiatives): Identify planned revenue streams lacking supporting innovation projects.

Prioritize innovation projects 

Many innovation shops find that only 20 percent of their projects generate 80 percent of their portfolio鈥檚 value. This also means that 80 percent of their investment only produces 20 percent of their portfolio鈥檚 value. The goal is to avoid these low-impact projects that take time, energy, and resources but dilute your portfolio.

This problem can be remedied by ranking your current and planned innovation projects based on their potential to contribute to enterprise growth objectives, considering factors like projected revenue impact, strategic alignment with enterprise objectives, time to market, and resource requirements. 

STEP 4: Audit your current innovation resource allocation

Once you鈥檝e prioritized your innovation projects by alignment with enterprise objectives, it鈥檚 time to review the resources allocated to them. Are the financial, human, and technical resources distributed in a way that aligns with their priority? 

Align your resource allocation plan to growth innovation targets

Based on your identified gaps and idealized allocations, determine specific actions that can be taken to realign resource allocation. After getting the necessary buy-in from any specific stakeholders, set a timeline for implementing these changes and assign responsibility to specific individuals or teams.

Identify resource allocation gaps 

Pinpoint areas where the current resource allocation does not align with your identified priorities and needs. Can you determine the reasons for these incongruencies, like misaligned goals, inaccurate forecasting, changing market conditions, or inefficient processes? Make your best effort to quantify these gaps. 

Create a structure to fix these gaps 

Establish a framework for making future resource allocation decisions consistent with this ideal state. This will require maintaining an up-to-date list of future projects and their projected impact on enterprise objectives. If you鈥檙e interested in how to maintain this fluid project list, we鈥檝e written articles that cover it for new product development, front-end innovation, and overall portfolio management. 

Download the Growth Innovation Strategy Template

We鈥檝e put together a Growth Innovation Strategy Template to help expedite some of this process and help you visualize the strategy. Download it and fill it out, and you鈥檒l have a tool for communicating the strategy to your innovation teams and other stakeholders. 

Also, once you鈥檝e filled out this template, you should be able to recreate the process for any audience at any time with a simple whiteboard and marker. 

Set your course for the future

The steps outlined here will set you up with a growth innovation strategy, but that鈥檚 only the beginning. Now you鈥檒l need to execute your plan. Once you have governance to align your activities with your strategy, your innovation portfolio will start meeting critical enterprise objectives. 

Growth innovation methodology propels your enterprise into an advanced stage of innovation management, which can lead to significant transformations in how the organization approaches innovation planning, execution, and evaluation. If you鈥檙e ready to take the next step in reinventing your organization鈥檚 innovation culture, check out 鈥淭he Enterprise Leader's Guide to Building a Growth Innovation Culture.鈥�

Get your hands on the tech solution that will equip you to do it at scale, giving you real-time auditing, role-based workflows, and metrics that make sense.