The parts look familiar: Prioritization, Roadmapping, Governance, Enablement, Methodology, and Reporting. But under the hood, growth innovation is rebuilding the machine. Same labels, new mechanics. This shift isn’t cosmetic, it’s structural. And if your processes haven’t evolved with it, you’re not just falling behind, you’re working against the system.
Managing any complex system means excelling at various disciplines; innovation management is no exception. We’ve isolated six critical disciplines in managing any innovation portfolio. Organizations group and name activities in their own way—but any enterprise that engages in meaningful innovation is already doing all six of these.
Growth innovation is the next evolutionary stage of innovation management, and it profoundly impacts these disciplines. As you will see, the terminology used to describe the disciplines hasn’t changed, but growth innovation is creating many fundamental shifts in what those disciplines look like and how they’re practiced.
It can be confusing to find yourself in the middle of these massive evolutionary shifts. The language everyone is using seems familiar, but they seem to be communicating increasingly different ideas. It’s like being a research assistant in the early stages of the internet. Everyone is still talking about data analysis, collaboration, libraries, and conferences, but new tools and practices are starting to impact what those words mean.
So, let’s examine these six disciplines of enterprise innovation management, give a brief overview of growth innovation, and then unpack how growth innovation is transforming those disciplines.
The 6 disciplines of growth innovation management
We’ll begin by exploring each of the six disciplines with a short description that’s likely already relevant to what you’re doing with your portfolio. These disciplines can be broken into two distinct groupings: strategic and operational disciplines.
Strategic disciplines
These three strategic disciplines enable you to plot out processes across your entire portfolio. The work done at this stage ensures that your portfolio aligns with enterprise objectives and that processes are in place to address every initiative effectively.
1. Prioritization
This discipline is about evaluating the order in which you pursue innovation opportunities. Several criteria, including strategic alignment, potential impact, and feasibility, can be employed to ensure that the right projects are chosen.
2. Roadmapping
Roadmapping is an activity focused on outlining the timeline of innovation activities. It identifies milestones, anticipates needs and requirements, and aligns the work across the entire portfolio, facilitating communication and coordination across teams and stakeholders.
3. Governance
It’s critical to have defined roles and responsibilities, decision-making processes, and clear systems for oversight. When innovation governance is handled well, risk is effectively managed, and innovation initiatives are conducted in a fashion that aligns with organizational policies.
Operational disciplines
These are the disciplines necessary to implement your planned initiatives and projects effectively. Functioning at a high level here guarantees that everyone has the tools, processes, and communication necessary to deliver projects on time or respond to obstacles as they arise.
4. Enablement
Individuals and teams need the resources, tools, and support to deliver on initiatives. This includes the technological tools required to do the work and the training, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing platforms necessary to keep the pipeline moving.
5. Methodology
This discipline focuses on the specific processes and approaches used to manage innovation. This could include frameworks like Stage Gate, Lean Startup, or Agile. A clearly defined methodology provides consistent structures for every process involved in the innovation life cycle.
6. Reporting
Without a clear strategy for reporting, keeping the innovation pipeline running smoothly is a challenge. Staying on top of key metrics and relevant KPIs allows you to track progress, identify areas of improvement, and respond to challenges as they arise. Sharing this data with stakeholders ensures that all necessary personnel are informed and aligned on projects.
An introduction to the discipline diads
As we’ve seen, the six disciplines can be divided into three strategic and three operational categories. Each strategic discipline has a corresponding operational discipline, and the two ideally operate in conjunction. When these diads work in harmony, they remove barriers and empower the entire enterprise to innovate more efficiently and effectively.
Prioritization – Reporting
Prioritization determines what projects and initiatives get green-lit and resourced based on how they’re expected to contribute to the enterprise strategy.
Reporting monitors the pipeline to ensure that those projects are delivering on those expectations.
Roadmapping – Methodology
Roadmapping sets the long-term agenda for what will be done and when.
Methodology establishes the processes for accomplishing it.
Governance – Enablement
Governance sets the framework and policies for controlling and managing innovation.
Enablement equips everyone with the tools, structures, and practices to carry it out.
How growth innovation transforms these disciplines
Growth innovation is an innovation management philosophy prioritizing growth as the most critical innovation outcome. This approach treats the entire portfolio as a unified business case, meaning no initiative, project, or decision happens in a vacuum. Each one impacts the entire ecosystem, and, ultimately, the enterprise. This isn’t just a theoretical approach to innovation; it’s a practical one, requiring a decisive cultural shift to realize.
Every stakeholder needs to know what they’re working to achieve and what part they contribute. They also need to be aligned and working in harmony with the others. They need access to the most critical information necessary to perform their part, which should be available when it’s most advantageous.
This requires a commitment to three basic principles:
Growth
Everything centers around clearly defining the enterprise’s growth objectives and identifying the gaps between current revenue generation and these established targets. From there, every single innovation initiative undertaken is directly and explicitly tied to filling those gaps and meeting those objectives.
Visibility
All relevant innovation management data should be consolidated into a single, centralized system. This platform serves as an authoritative repository for all data related to ideation, experimentation, development, and deployment, allowing every stakeholder to access the most pertinent information necessary to inform their decisions and activities. Commitment to visibility translates into a commitment to uploading, maintaining, and distributing this data.
Orchestration
Growth innovation requires approaching strategic decisions with a holistic view of the portfolio. Managing interdependencies across the whole portfolio optimizes resource allocation and mitigates potential conflicts. And through regular reviews, you can make any necessary adjustments to ensure that innovation efforts contribute directly to enterprise objectives.
Download our free ebook, The Growth Innovation Trifecta, to better understand these three principles and how they form the backbone of growth innovation.
How growth innovation transforms the six disciplines
As we pointed out earlier, every innovation shop is already engaged in these six disciplines. Without some form of prioritization, no enterprise could function. The real question is about how you are doing them. Does the execution of each of these disciplines inform and impact the others? Are they interconnected and tactically implemented to hit revenue targets?
Growth innovation puts enterprise growth first, and this focus supercharges the disciplines and transforms their impact on the other disciplines, on your individual initiatives, and ultimately on the entire portfolio.
Let’s take a brief look at the ways growth innovation impacts each discipline.
Prioritization: Several significant factors must be considered when prioritizing the projects in your portfolio. Growth innovation prioritizes closing revenue gaps first, which helps clarify the role other factors play in prioritization.
It also makes it much easier to know when initiatives must be retired or paused. Instead of having a bunch of zombie projects gumming up the pipeline, you have a more explicit expectation for a project to be considered viable, and less concern about changing their status.
The free ebook Purging Zombie Projects: How to Conduct a Portfolio Audit covers this in more detail.
Roadmapping: The visibility principle of growth innovation ensures that you have informative, useful, historical data that you can leverage to plan future projects and initiatives. And when that visibility is coupled with portfolio-wide orchestration efforts, the entire pipeline is able to flow more smoothly and predictably.
Governance: Growth innovation provides the means for clear lines of authority, accountability, and strategic direction from the top down. Effective full-portfolio performance reviews ensure that project-level decisions align with the organization’s business objectives and provide consistent direction across the entire portfolio.
Enablement: With a unified innovation management system, critical data is available to the stakeholders who need it. The strategy and governance materials are documented and socialized with the appropriate team members. Workflows are automated and account for portfolio-wide interdependencies and implications.
Methodology: With growth innovation, work is aligned with an enterprise-focused strategy that focuses on hitting revenue targets and closing gaps. Your processes are coordinated with precise roadmaps that offer reliable launch schedules. The organization focuses on maintaining current data, helping to keep project management running smoothly, and enabling you to anticipate snags before they become significant problems.
Reporting: More data visibility makes it possible for stakeholders to access the reports they need rather than waiting for someone else to pull and compile the information. And precise KPIs track projects’ material contributions to growth objectives.
How growth innovation transforms discipline relationships
Growth innovation doesn’t simply change how we think about and perform the innovation disciplines. The three principles of innovation (growth, visibility, and orchestration) strengthen and transform the connective tissue between the disciplines, changing their relationship and impacting their interaction.
Without growth innovation, the disciplines are fractured
Normally, each innovation discipline may function independently, giving them the illusion of functionality. But by way of analogy, you can think of them as smart machines operating in a warehouse suffering from unreliable WiFi connectivity. They may operate effectively on their own but struggle to coordinate their actions, which ultimately results in inefficiencies and inferior performance, failing to align efforts toward common goals.
Apart from growth innovation, prioritization decisions can become reactive based on what we think we can get through the pipeline first. This means that prioritization becomes absorbed into the road mapping process rather than operating interdependently.
And instead of being a discipline that provides guardrails and guidance for methodology, governance can become a siloed collection of theoretical concepts that remain isolated from our systems. Without a clear connection to governance, methodology can limp along and struggle to respond to obstacles that arise.
Too often, enablement is scattered across systems and platforms that don’t share data and ineffectively inform stakeholders and team members. This only isolates the disciplines of roadmapping, methodology, and reporting further, negatively impacting the interdependence of the entire portfolio.
We look to reporting to offer a clear picture of the health and progress of initiatives, but too often reporting is reduced to statements about methodology’s activities. Eventually roadmapping and methodology become the only two disciplines operating with a strong, consistent feedback loop.
Growth innovation builds virtuous feedback loops between disciplines
Growth innovation thrives when the various disciplines operate synergistically. You can think about it like a complex living organism where different biological systems function harmoniously, automatically functioning and adjusting for the overall health of the entire organism.
By aligning our criteria for prioritizing initiatives with the metrics used to report their progress, we know that our efforts are focused on what is truly driving growth and that their performance is being measured against these priorities. The feedback we receive from reporting is then used to inform future prioritization decisions, helping to create a continuous cycle of improvement.
Innovation requires a clear governance structure that defines roles, responsibilities, and decision-making processes. When this is in place and coupled with an enablement discipline that provides the necessary resources, tools, and support for innovation teams, strategic guidance is translated to functional competence—and innovation needs help inform how the governance structure evolves.
When the governance-enablement diad is aligned, roadmapping and methodology are transfigured. Instead of a static set of plans and procedures, stakeholders and innovation teams know what to do when things go awry and have the tools necessary to course correct.
The key ingredients necessary for transformation
This transformational shift toward growth innovation won’t just happen on its own. You’re not simply setting ambitious targets; you’re fundamentally changing how the organization operates and thinks about innovation. If you want to supercharge innovation disciplines, there will be a couple of requirements.
Let’s examine each of those in turn.
1. Effective change management
For growth innovation to be effective, you’ll need the buy-in, understanding, and active participation of everyone adjacent to innovation in your enterprise. The justifications for the shift need to be socialized, and the strategy needs to be laid out. Effective change management will:
- Give people a growth innovation strategy to follow
People will need to understand the framework driving the organization’s innovation and the context for the changes they’ll be expected to implement. As they begin to understand the “why” behind these changes and their role in executing them, they're more likely to embrace this new model. - Set official priorities
During these kinds of transformations, competing priorities and initiatives can create confusion and frustration. By helping them understand that closing revenue gaps is the most critical priority for innovation and that growth is the most significant outcome, their understanding of the disciplines can begin to shift. - Realign roadmaps to meet growth objectives
Your team may be on board to journey to this new destination, but you’ll need to update their navigational tools so they can get there. Your existing roadmaps may no longer be aligned with your strategic objectives, so you’ll need to review timelines, dependencies, and expected outcomes and, where necessary, realign them with your goals. - Enforce governance
Effective change management will require that you readdress roles and responsibilities, establish decision-making processes, and implement mechanisms for monitoring progress and addressing potential roadblocks. - Get people on board with new systems, structures, and practices
New processes and enablement systems will play an essential part in this transformation. Not only must you get people to embrace these new tools and practices, but they will also need the training and oversight necessary to make them a natural part of their new workflow. - Oversee and implement changes to methodologies
New methodologies will need to be clearly defined, and coaching will be crucial to ensure they’re effectively integrated into your existing workflows. A well-managed transition to new systems and processes will minimize disruption. - Set new standards for reporting
Growth innovation will impact what is considered relevant data, and any changes to how data is collected, analyzed, and shared with relevant stakeholders will need to be communicated. This includes establishing new KPIs or foregoing obsolete ones. You’ll need to clearly define reporting formats and frequencies, and ensure that individuals understand their responsibilities in the reporting process
2. Effective innovation management software
Having the technological infrastructure necessary to enable growth innovation is a must. This may seem like a significant investment, but it becomes your central hub for managing and monitoring the innovation pipeline, providing transparency, streamlining processes, and empowering data-driven decision making.
The right software will:
- Let people see priorities (and how they affect innovation activities)
It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of having a centralized view of all ongoing and planned innovation initiatives, clearly identifying their link to your strategic priorities. This transparency allows individuals and teams to understand how projects contribute to larger growth objectives and ensures that efforts are aligned with your priorities. - Keep roadmaps up to date
Roadmaps are dynamic and must evolve as projects progress, priorities shift, and opportunities emerge. The best IM software keeps roadmaps current by providing tools for tracking progress, managing dependencies, and automatically disseminating changes to affected projects. - Make governance materials accessible and automate some policies via workflows
Policies, guidelines, and approval policies need to be accessible to stakeholders. Your IM software should facilitate this so everyone has the necessary info to operate within your updated structure. It should also automate specific policies through built-in workflows like approval requests and progress reviews. - Become the backbone of your enablement
Your IM software should function as the central nervous system of your innovation operations, becoming a platform for managing ideas, tracking projects, allocating resources, and facilitating collaboration across various teams and departments. - Give everyone a clear view of how projects are progressing through the pipeline
Various innovation projects and initiatives may follow different methodologies. Your IM software should allow a clear, system-agnostic picture of projects advancing through innovation stages. This allows relevant stakeholders to assess a project’s status, identify potential bottlenecks, and track their overall progress.
Take the leap: Transform your approach to innovation
The changes that come with growth innovation aren’t aesthetic. They transform innovation management from the top down and the inside out, modifying the operations within the six disciplines and altering the operations between them. If you’re interested in transforming the philosophy and processes undergirding your innovation management, you’ll need a plan for managing change.
You’ll also need an IM software capable of streamlining your processes, aligning your strategies, front-facing your critical data, and unlocking your portfolio’s potential. These are the very things Accolade was designed to do. Start transforming your innovation management. Book an Accolade demo.