Once upon a time, getting lost on a road trip meant pulling over to unfold a (huge) paper map and hoping your co-pilot knew north from south! Today, we expect GPS-level clarity: turn-by-turn directions, real-time rerouting, and an ETA we can actually trust.
So why are so many innovation portfolios still running on paper-map logic?
Modern leaders need more than a static view of their pipeline. They need dynamic visibility, strategic alignment, and the confidence to course-correct before delays turn into detours.
That’s what growth innovation delivers and it’s how you finally fix the black box problem.
Most business leaders understand that innovation is critical to remaining relevant and competitive. What they don’t anticipate are the challenges involved in effectively managing innovation. Effectively shepherding a project from ideation to commercialization means running it through many stages in a rather long and complicated pipeline—and that’s for a single project. It gets exponentially more complicated with an entire portfolio.
Innovation has a “black box” problem. The processes enterprises use to facilitate hundreds—or thousands—of innovation projects are unpredictable and vague. The uncertainties around innovation make it incredibly difficult to set meaningful budgets and predictable timelines.
Anyone responsible for an innovation portfolio understands the headaches associated with this lack of transparency, leading to problems like:
- Risk mismanagement
An enterprise might aspire to take big swings at innovation opportunities, setting it up for long-term growth, but what trickles out of the innovation pipeline is a stream of minor, incremental improvements that are low-risk and, consequently, low reward.
This means precious resources are invested in projects that don’t really align with the organization's overall objectives. Innovation teams that aspire to tackle ambitious projects often end up frustrated and disillusioned, spinning out piecemeal changes to already existing products.
- Phantom launch dates
Most enterprises have a disconnect between planned launch dates and actual missed dates—it’s not uncommon for new products to launch 180 days behind their original schedule. This establishes a culture where rollout dates are seen as arbitrary or aspirational, and no one feels accountable to them. This erodes trust between teams, departments, executive leadership, and other stakeholders.
The problem goes beyond cultural impact though. A new product misses 100% of its planned revenue every day that its launch dallies—and every delay is a chance you extend to your competitors to beat you to the market. - Chronic underfunding
Uncertain outcomes mean that innovation portfolio managers constantly struggle to secure funding for their teams. This stifles FEI and NPD when it comes to exploring the true potential of new ideas, leading to decreased outcomes and stagnant growth.
Portfolio managers can also see their most talented people jumping ship for organizations willing to invest in their ideas and fund legitimate successes.
- Ambiguous reporting
Often, managers are lucky to have metrics that accurately portray where projects are in the various innovation stages. However, they’re not as likely to have KPIs that demonstrate any meaningful connection to business objectives. This difficulty in assessing the overall value of projects and their potential ROI contributes to the problem of underfunding.
This lack of truly meaningful KPIs can also feed into the disconnect between innovation teams and stakeholders, which can make your innovation portfolio even more incongruous with the enterprise’s overall strategy.
- Zombie projects
Lack of visibility into the innovation pipeline means that projects can stall out, consuming valuable personnel hours and funding without ever making significant progress. The resources these projects consume would be better spent on higher-priority projects or new initiatives.
These zombie projects don’t just gobble up resources; they’re also a frustrating drain on morale. They decrease productivity, zap motivation, and leach momentum from critical projects.
An enterprise's long-term success is built upon its ability to innovate. The global market is more competitive than ever, and innovation is happening at a dizzying pace in almost every sector. The pressure is high, and innovation leaders are often managing with blinders on, lacking the visibility they need to plan for reliable wins.
But you can crack open that black box, and growth innovation is the key.
Opening the black box with growth innovation
As an innovation manager, what do you wish you could change about your portfolio? Would it be to accelerate the pace of launches? Maybe you’d like to boost revenue for new products. How about creating a pipeline that’s a little more dynamic and flexible, making it easier to adapt to a changing marketplace?
Growth innovation is a management philosophy prioritizing growth as the most critical outcome of innovation. By managing every element of your innovation portfolio around growth, you not only solve the black box problem but also bring these other outcomes within reach.
The growth innovation methodology removes the black box by:
- Aligning innovation activities around growth
By establishing a direct correlation between innovation initiatives and organization revenue goals, projects aren’t disconnected from corporate objectives. Every activity is centered around hitting targets and contributing to organizational growth.
- Providing stakeholders with 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’re equipped to address potential problems before things get off track—or grind to a halt entirely.
- Orchestrating projects with the whole portfolio in mind
The black box problem obscures the interdependencies of your numerous initiatives and the ripple effects of various decisions and actions throughout the innovation process. The ultimate goal of portfolio management is to coordinate and synchronize individual projects with the entire portfolio. Growth innovation ensures that each project is aligned with the entire portfolio and scales up to meet organizational growth and revenue objectives.
Peak growth innovation relies on an enterprise innovation management system (like Accolade) that streamlines processes, improves visibility into every stage of the development cycle, and reduces confusion. But you don’t need to make a big investment to get the ball rolling. By following these initial steps, you create some order and reliability within your portfolio.
3 practical steps to bring transparency to your innovation portfolio
In its ideal state, any system or process feels almost effortlessly manageable. As they drift from their ideal state, it can take everyone’s effort just to put out fires and keep things running, and improving these systems and processes can feel like they require time and energy that you don’t have at your disposal.
The following steps will require a time investment. But if you get others on board and set aside a little time each week to tackle them, they’re completely doable. And they’ll make your portfolio more transparent, easier to manage, and ultimately more successful.
1. Write a growth innovation strategy
If bottom-up transparency is the goal, implementing top-down transparency is a smart place to start. You’ll accomplish this by writing and socializing a growth innovation strategy. This strategy will be your roadmap for the enterprise’s innovation efforts for all stakeholders.
We’ll outline some of the broad strokes necessary for creating an innovation strategy, but our “How to Translate Corporate Objectives into a Growth Innovation Strategy” guide is much more granular and prescriptive. You can also use the “Growth Innovation Strategy Template,” which will give you a clear model to follow.
Assemble a growth innovation strategy task force
To do this right, you’ll need to compensate for the problems inherent to the black box. This means pulling all the divergent information about the projects in the pipeline from the people in the know. So start with a cross-functional team that includes key stakeholders and the people from your FEI and NPD with the most knowledge about the projects and processes currently in place.
Mapping your enterprise objectives to growth innovation targets
The first step is to pull together the corporate objectives for the next five years. Your business may not have clearly articulated objectives that far out yet, and that’s alright. You can create projections from historical data if necessary—just make sure to include any business or external factors that might impact those objectives, like regulatory changes, economic shifts, socio-political cycles, upcoming opportunities, etc.
Once you gather these objectives, you’ll set growth innovation targets: you need to determine what innovation needs to accomplish in order for the enterprise to meet those objectives. Remember to account for other planned business activities, such as sales, marketing, any planned mergers and acquisitions, etc., too. Assuming all these other factors play out as planned, plot out the new product launches, new product revenue, etc., that will fall to innovation in order for those objectives to become reality. Then turn those results into specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely targets.
Plan for hitting those growth innovation targets and allocating resources
After you’ve established your innovation targets, it’s time to consult with leaders in NPD and FEI to get a handle on current and planned projects that can contribute to hitting these targets. It may help to categorize these projects into growth innovation initiatives based on their potential impact and alignment with your new targets.
You should evaluate and prioritize these growth innovation initiatives based on their potential revenue contribution and strategic importance. This will help you develop a resource allocation plan that aligns with the priorities, ensuring that the most consequential initiatives receive adequate funding and support. You should also regularly review and adjust this resource allocation plan based on the progress and performance of these initiatives.
Socialize the strategy with the key parties
You’ll want to ensure you have formal approval from any relevant leadership. Key influencers' support will also be critical. They’re the ones who will champion this strategy and help drive its adoption, so it’s important to get their buy-in early.
Once you have these pieces in place, you can begin rolling out your growth strategy to the innovation teams reporting to you. They’ll need a working knowledge of the innovation targets and initiatives and an understanding of how they’ll be measured and monitored.
It will also be helpful for your innovation teams to appreciate how enterprise objectives were mapped to these targets and how innovation initiatives will ladder back up to contribute to the organization's objectives. The better they understand the hows and whys, the easier it will be for them to respond to opportunities and issues with these targets in mind.
Lastly, socialize the strategy to other lateral leaders in the organization; this will help remove innovation’s black box across the entire enterprise, fostering greater collaboration and better alignment with innovation goals and initiatives.
2. Update governance throughout your NPD organization
One effective way to begin breaking open the black box is by updating the way your NPD shop is run. You can get a more in-depth look at this process by reading “How to Fix the Black Box Problem in Your NPD Pipeline,” but here are some of the broad strokes.
It all starts with getting a firm handle on all the active projects in your pipeline. Focusing on active projects makes this task more manageable and ensures your efforts are concentrated on what matters right now. Pull together your NPD leadership so that you can start populating this list.
Consider what key information you’ll need to have for each project on this list. This might include the following:
- Planned launch and projected launch dates
Comparing the projected launch date to the planned one allows for identifying potential delays and their causes. This facilitates effective timeline adjustments, resource allocation, and expectation management.
- Planned budget vs. actual cost
Project costs tend to escalate unexpectedly, and the reasons can be obscured by the black box. To better track cost overruns, this data should be accessible for every project.
- Key project staff
Knowing what personnel is attached to specific projects streamlines communication, clearly delegates responsibilities, and ensures projects have the necessary expertise to progress effectively.
- Current pipeline stage
This granular visibility into various project stages allows for the identification and resolution of bottlenecks, which can significantly enhance the efficiency and success rates of the entire portfolio.
- Their connection to organizational revenue goals
It’s critical that every project in the pipeline has a clear, documented strategy for increasing revenue—either directly or indirectly—and is strategically aligned with the company's overall goals.
Keeping the project list up to date
You’re not compiling this list as a one-time overview of everything in the pipeline. This list will become a living document offering the most precise snapshot of innovation initiatives and projects at any given moment. Assigning clear ownership and responsibility for maintaining the project list ensures that it remains accurate and current.
Determine who should be responsible for overseeing and updating this list. This means setting guidelines for when and how it will be maintained. Communicating this list’s importance and setting clear expectations for its maintenance fosters a sense of ownership and accountability among everyone involved as you begin socializing it.
Implement regular, consistent, cross-functional portfolio reviews
It’s likely that you're currently reviewing the projects and initiatives in your portfolio, but it’s essential that this happens with a consistent cadence. Regular reviews ensure that all stakeholders are informed about the progress of each project and can provide input and feedback.
Use the project list as a starting point for discussing active projects in the portfolio. This not only ensures you have a canonical list of everything innovation is currently working on but also reinforces the list’s importance. NPD stakeholders should update the list throughout these meetings and ensure that any stakeholders who need updates are looped in.
Any time innovation projects come up, go out of your way to remind people to reference or update the list, making it an integral part of NPD operations.
Implement growth-oriented reporting for NPD
Now that you have more visibility into your NPD pipeline projects, the next step is to maintain alignment between each project and overall portfolio strategy with corporate objectives. This involves enhancing progress reports with information relevant to the enterprise’s ultimate goals.
Begin by carefully examining the data in your report. Evaluate the data's focus and determine if your metrics truly enable strategic resource allocation, accurately assess effectiveness, and foster team accountability. Ensure that your KPIs deliver actionable insights that align with organizational objectives. Identify any data gaps that could negatively impact decision-making or obscure the view of revenue potential.
What you really want to know is whether meeting all target KPIs guarantees the project’s success. If not, it's time to reexamine your reporting. You shouldn’t be relying on metrics that don’t track progress toward growth targets. They should clearly identify where a project exceeds expectations and where changes are needed to get development back on track.
3. Run an initial pilot program
A pilot program can be a strategic way to learn on the fly as you fine-tune your growth innovation methodology. This small-scale program will allow you to limit the scope of your changes until you work out the kinks, ensuring that when you roll out changes to your entire business unit, you’re ready.
Wellspring consulting clients have found that the two best candidates for pilot projects tend to be:
- A-teams:
These teams have demonstrated an ability to take new directives and run with them. They rise to challenges, collaborate effectively, and are adept at documenting their processes. Their brand of exceptional performance suggests that the pilot program will succeed. If you want a growth innovation trial run and ensure you have everything lined up, pull in one of your A-teams. - Underdogs:
Pick a team that would benefit from any strategic attention. These teams may have historically underachieved, or perhaps they haven’t received the attention and guidance necessary to thrive. These teams benefit from the opportunity to excel, leading to a remarkable turnaround (and impressive before/after numbers). If you really want to stress test your new growth innovation methodology and give some of your underdogs focused attention, try running the pilot with this sort of team.
Either option can offer an ideal outcome, provided the program is constructed to deliver precise and persuasive results. Set specific, measurable goals for the program that align with overall enterprise growth objectives (essentially a miniature growth innovation strategy). Implement consistent processes for progress reviews (small-scale orchestration) and consolidate all relevant pilot program data into a single system to generate program reports (data visibility).
Take the leap: write a growth innovation strategy
When put into practice, the steps we’ve outlined here will offer all-new visibility into your portfolio. This transparency is the starting point for fixing the black box problem. But if you genuinely want to bring your innovation portfolio into long-term alignment with your enterprise’s objectives, you’ll need a comprehensive growth innovation strategy.
You wouldn’t plan a major trip without directions. Don’t manage your innovation portfolio that way, either. Build a strategy that gives you clarity, alignment, and control, so your team knows where it’s going, and how to win when they get there.
If you’re ready to take that next step, read our growth innovation strategy guide and get the template.
And while you’re at it, book a demo of Accolade, and discover how it can unlock your portfolio’s potential.