How to Fix the Black Box Problem in Your NPD Pipeline

In Mission: Impossible, Ethan Hunt pulls off the unthinkable - breaking into vaults, hacking encrypted files, and dodging invisible lasers. But even he might struggle to navigate your new product development (NPD) pipeline.

Why? Because when innovation turns into a black box, even the most elite operators are flying blind.

In today’s high-stakes business landscape, treating innovation like a covert op is a recipe for disaster. If your team’s working without intel, the mission is already compromised.

When launch dates vanish, zombie projects linger, and budgets go boom with nothing to show for it, the signs are clear: something’s gone rogue.

The real mission, should you choose to accept it?Restore visibility, alignment, and strategic control across your NPD pipeline.

This blog shows you how to crack open the black box...starting now.

Innovation gives your enterprise a competitive advantage, and new product development (NDP) is critical in the process. Forward-thinking organizations that fine-tune their development processes dominate the marketplace—and can even redefine industry innovation standards. 

But this is much easier said than done. 

Wellspring has identified one significant issue standing in the way of managing innovation effectively, and that’s the “black box” problem. In the past, the R&D sandbox was mostly isolated from day-to-day business operations. And while innovation processes have evolved to become more integrated into business operations today, many of the processes involved in innovation are still hazy, vague, and challenging to manage effectively. This makes it difficult to allocate funds effectively, make accurate forecasts, and ultimately ensure that the innovation pipeline is meeting business objectives. 

Shouldering responsibility for innovation-related business units can feel like a challenge when confronted by these black-box maladies:

Phantom launch dates 

An inability to adhere to target launch dates feels like the natural cost of doing business in innovation-heavy enterprises, but the financial fallout can be immense. When you consider the impact of large-scale projects in industries like pharmaceuticals or aerospace, every day of lag can translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue. 

Chronic underfunding 

When data in the innovation pipeline isn’t forthcoming, executives find it difficult to justify allocating the necessary resources. But this doesn’t just impact specific projects; it can create a cycle of underfunding. Insufficient resources ensure that innovation teams struggle to deliver expected results, impacting their ability to secure funding for upcoming projects. 

Zombie projects

Sometimes projects and initiatives get stuck in the pipeline for years, consuming personnel hours and income while getting no closer to delivering on a defined goal or outcome. Yes, these living dead projects hurt budgets, but they’re also a significant drain on the morale of individuals forced to nurse them along. 

These problems shouldn’t be considered the cost of managing innovation. You can dismantle the black box and manage innovation with the same kind of visibility and expectations that other business unit managers experience—and growth innovation is the key to doing so. 

Solving the black box problem with growth innovation

Growth innovation is a management philosophy that prioritizes growth as the most critical innovation outcome. It focuses on three distinct principles:

1. Growth: Articulating measurable growth targets in the innovation strategy and explicitly connecting every innovation activity to at least one of those targets.
2. Visibility: Centralizing all innovation management data in one place and giving every stakeholder access to the information they need.
3. Orchestration: Making every decision within the context of a portfolio-level growth strategy.

Embracing and applying these principles impact how you develop strategies, prioritize projects, and analyze performance. Adopting a growth innovation methodology empowers you to crack open that black box and transform the entire innovation process by:

• • Aligning innovation activities around growth
    Growth innovation enables you to immediately establish a clear and direct link between product development projects and your enterprise’s growth objectives. Beginning with this end in mind lets you prioritize projects and know that your innovation efforts will drive tangible and marketable results.
    
    This not only benefits you in the short term as you decide which projects to pursue and which ones need to be cut, but it also gives you a rubric for crafting a portfolio that meets your growth objectives in the long term.
    
    
  • Providing stakeholders with visibility
    The innovation pipeline can be years long, and there are a lot of places along the way where projects can become detached from the objectives that spawned them. This is often a direct result of the “black box” problem. When key stakeholders don’t have visibility into the pipeline at critical stages of development, projects can stall, gobble up resources, or come out unrecognizable and under-marketable.
    
    Project management data (like budgets, resource allocation, and KPIs), timelines (including schedules and task dependencies), process interdependencies and workflows, or product performance are necessary for NPD to function correctly. Growth innovation methodology prioritizes making the best data available to the individuals who need it when they need it. Timely and available data reverses the impact of innovation's black box, ensuring trust, transparency, and teamwork.
    
    
  • Orchestrating projects with the whole portfolio in mind
    Lack of transparency in your development process means that simply moving individual projects through the pipeline is a herculean task requiring your full attention. Projects become siloed from one another and disconnected from the portfolio, forcing innovation managers to run from project to project to shepherd each one along.

If you want to learn more about crafting a working growth innovation strategy, check out “How to Craft a Growth Innovation Strategy.”

Fully realized growth innovation can only happen at scale with a purpose-built enterprise innovation management system (like Accolade.) But sourcing and implementing a software solution takes time—and it doesn’t need to be your first step toward transforming your approach to innovation and development. There are things you can start doing right now to begin cracking open the innovation black box in your NPD processes.

3 practical steps to bring more transparency to NPD processes now

The lack of visibility into NPD processes leads to increased costs, time-to-market delays, performance and quality issues, and stakeholder frustration. But there are some simple moves you can start making now that will significantly impact NPD’s overall transparency. 

1. Compile an exhaustive list of your active pipeline

You want an accurate lay of the land, but to manage this task effectively, focus your attention on the projects that are considered “active” in your pipeline. Don’t bog yourself down with projects that have been shelved, postponed, or canceled. Zero in on pulling together an exhaustive list of what’s currently active. 

This will help you identify all of the projects that have been stuck in your pipeline without making any significant progress. By identifying these “zombie” projects, you can strategically restructure or terminate them altogether, saving critical attention and resources for other projects. 

Identifying necessary and vital project information 

Dismantling innovation’s black box requires acquiring all the essential data necessary to make knowledgeable decisions, so as you compile this list, determine what information you need to get a read on each project. This requisite information could include (but is not limited to):

• Planned and projected launch dates

• Planned budget vs. actual cost
  Within the black box, there is a tendency for project budgets to balloon without any clear explanation. If you want an accurate view of cost overruns, you’ll want access to this data for each project. 

• Key project staff
  Each project needs to be linked to the key personnel responsible. This will ultimately enable you to facilitate communication, assign responsibilities, and ensure that projects are progressing with the necessary expertise.

• Current pipeline stage
  Knowing where projects are in the process is critical for each project, but it may also be necessary for the pipeline itself. If you want to remedy bottlenecks at various stages in the pipeline, you need to know where individual projects are getting caught up. This level of visibility can have a pretty dramatic impact on the entire portfolio. 

• Their connection to organizational revenue goals
  This is where the growth-innovation rubber meets the road. Each project in the pipeline needs to be strategically aligned with the company. This means having a clear, documented understanding of how each active project in the pipeline will contribute to revenue, whether directly or indirectly. 

Composing this list of active projects and the crucial details associated with each one goes a long way toward removing uncertainties from the innovation processes.

2. Keep the active project list up to date 

Compiling a list of your active projects can help determine where projects are and what changes need to occur to keep everything progressing. But static lists fall out of date quickly. If you don’t keep your list current, you’ll lose all the clarity you gained and the black-box problem will return with a vengeance. 

To stop this from happening, you need to keep this list as active and current as possible. This not only ensures you have the future oversight you need but also guarantees that other necessary players in NPD have the same visibility.

However, keeping this list up-to-date sounds easier than it is (otherwise, you’d probably already be doing it). Here are some tips to ensure it stays updated in a timely and effective manner. 

A. Determine what team members should have editing responsibilities 

It doesn’t make any sense for the R&D business unit manager to be the only person responsible for updating this list, but making it everyone’s responsibility ends up making it no one’s responsibility. So you’ll need to determine what roles or individuals should be responsible for updating it and ensure they have the necessary editing access.

Identify the roles or players from various pipeline stages (engineers, designers, product managers, marketers, etc.) whose input throughout the innovation process would provide the clearest picture of a project’s status. These people will be your cohorts and early adopters for maintaining the list. 

B. Socialize the list with these individuals  

Set up a meeting to introduce these players to the list, explaining its purposes and benefits. Help them understand the problems it will solve for the enterprise, for you, and ultimately, for them. 

Lay out your expectations for how it should be used and maintained. Demonstrate how information should be added, edited, and updated. Make sure to include any necessary stylistic expectations to ensure that details are coherent and consistent. 

C. Make a roll-out plan to introduce everyone to the list

For this list to offer necessary clarity to innovation teams, everyone must see it as the definitive, canonical reference for NPD projects. And they should understand that real-time updates ensure the information is always current and accurate. 

Introduce this resource to everyone with a workshop that explains:

• How the list should be updated
• When updates need to happen
• How to identify and notify stakeholders when critical information has been added or changed

You’ll need to document (and circulate) the standard operating procedures for updating information. This should include clear guidelines, spelling out what information should be included, how updates should be formatted, and when notifications should be sent. This document should be available and readily accessible to everyone who will be updating the list.

Lastly, you want this list to become a ubiquitous part of NPD meetings. So, encourage (or nag, if necessary) its use in every applicable gathering where projects are being discussed. Assign someone to update it during meetings, and follow up regularly with people to ensure it’s being used and updated.  

D. Establish regular cross-functional project reviews (and use the list)

If you’re not already doing so, begin implementing regular pipeline reviews involving stakeholders from every affected function. These need to be held consistently for the purpose of making sure all these active projects are working in concert. 

This list should be front and center during these reviews. This ensures that projects don’t fall through the cracks and holds everyone accountable for their areas of responsibility, but it also reinforces this list as the definitive archive for everything happening in NPD. 

As you touch on each process, update the list to reflect things like timeline changes, budget issues, design challenges, or marketing questions. From there, you can assign action items and deadlines to make sure projects don’t stall out at their current stage in the pipeline.

3. Institute more growth-focused reporting 

Now that you have a tool that improves visibility into the NPD projects in your pipeline, the next step is to ensure that each project (and the portfolio as a whole) remains aligned with corporate objectives. This means moving beyond progress-focused reporting and augmenting reports to include information relevant to enterprise goals.

Start by scrutinizing the data currently attached to your report. What is it focused on? 

Are you relying on the metrics that are easiest to track, or are you relying on metrics that allow you to allocate resources, assess actual effectiveness, and hold team members accountable? Do your KPIs provide actionable insights connected to organizational goals? Are there gaps in data that negatively impact your ability to make critical decisions or might interfere with revenue potential? 

But the most important question to ask is, “If this project meets all its target KPIs, can we be confident that it will generate the revenue we need it to?” If the answer is “no,” then it’s time for a reporting overhaul. The metrics you rely on should track progress toward growth targets. They should clearly identify where a project in the pipeline exceeds expectations and where changes need to be made to get development back on track. 

Learn more about innovation-focused metrics. 

Take the next step: write your own growth strategy

You shouldn’t have to rely on intuition and guesswork to manage innovation. The steps we’ve outlined here will give you more clarity on NPD processes. But if you want to bring the whole operation into long-term alignment with your enterprise’s objectives, you’ll need an actual growth innovation strategy.  

To see how Accolade can automate many of the critical functions required in managing NPD, book a demo today.