In the Back to the Future trilogy, Doc Brown's DeLorean didn’t just run on gas; it ran on innovation. Every time Marty McFly jumped timelines, it was thanks to a bold experiment, a clear goal (save the future, or the past), and a scientist who turned improbable ideas into high-powered (“1.21 gigawatts”) breakthroughs.
That’s the essence of growth innovation: not just invention for invention’s sake, but targeted, strategic innovation that moves the entire organization toward a specific vision of the future.
Today, more and more organizations are realizing that their front-end innovation (FEI) functions can’t afford to operate like isolated labs; they need to be plugged into the enterprise’s growth engine. Growth Innovation Management gives FEI teams the tools and frameworks to do exactly that.
In this article, we’ll explore the real-world benefits of applying growth innovation principles to your FEI teams and show you exactly how to get started—because every innovation team needs its own “flux capacitor,” the vital spark that powers breakthroughs forward.
Growth innovation methodology is bringing about the second generation of innovation management. There’s a lot of excitement around how this growth-first philosophy can improve the new product launch pipeline—but what does that look like for the front end of the innovation process, specifically?
Let’s examine the benefits that implementing growth innovation in your front-end innovation (FEI) teams can bring to your enterprise, and explore ways you can start implementing this approach right now.
The benefits of implementing growth innovation in FEI functions
Implementing growth innovation methodology brings a host of wins to teams working in research and discovery—but applying the principles of growth orientation, data visibility, and consistent orchestration to FEI functions also has cross-functional benefits for the rest of the enterprise.
1. Clearer research/results alignment
Under growth innovation, business leaders translate the enterprise’s growth strategy to innovation initiatives, explicitly tying each innovation project to one or more corporate objectives. This creates a clear throughline for every project’s lifecycle: from research and discovery to prototyping, manufacturing, marketing, sales, distribution, and performance analysis. Furthermore, innovation initiatives are prioritized and funded based on which objectives they support, and the magnitude to which they can support them. Every facet of the innovation process is saturated with the company’s strategy.
Doing this gives FEI teams a much clearer idea of how their projects scaffold up to the company’s objectives. Plus, it gives FEI, NPD, and GTM teams a shared language for discussing projects, making requests, and orchestrating multiple activities in harmony.
Linking innovation projects to the company’s strategy also gives FEI more visibility as to which requests they receive hold higher priority to the enterprise as a whole. This allows FEI to take more control of the triage process, assigning efforts to activities based on how they contribute to the company’s goals rather than based on the sense of urgency surrounding requests.
2. Focus and direction for anticipatory research
It’s common for FEI teams to develop their own portfolios of research and discovery projects in anticipation of possible requests from other innovation functions. However, without the strategic links and data visibility afforded by growth innovation methodology, FEI is often left in the dark as to what they should be exploring. Requests from the new product production pipeline often come with insufficient notice to start research from scratch, so FEI teams keep a series of projects in the hopper in hopes that they will come in handy for future requests.
But this means FEI teams often lack the focus and direction they need to invest in the right anticipatory projects. Instead, they need to make educated guesses as to what research they will need to have already completed. They’re working ahead, but they don’t know if they’re working ahead in the right direction.
Growth innovation changes this. By socializing the innovation strategy (which maps directly to overall objectives), FEI teams can more confidently focus their energies on researching, sourcing, and creating technologies that support high-priority innovation initiatives.
3. More predictable timelines (for both FEI and the rest of the pipeline)
Timelines are a common problem area in enterprise innovation today—and this is a point of frustration for teams throughout the innovation pipeline. High-urgency projects come to FEI teams from NPD functions, with requests to research, discover, and create technologies for upcoming new products. However, because FEI and NPD teams rarely give each other visibility to each others’ processes and workloads, these requests often fail to give FEI sufficient time to fully deliver. This often forces a difficult choice on FEI leaders: they can cut corners to deliver on time, or they can actually deliver on what NPD needs—but it sets the entire new product launch plan behind schedule.
The data visibility enterprises get by implementing growth innovation methodology helps resolve this timeline issue. Growth innovation implementation involves FEI and NPD restructuring their project management data in one shared system, allowing managers in both functions to see what’s currently coming down the pike across the innovation portfolio.
This means FEI gets better lead times, and NPD gets more predictable turnarounds. When a new FEI project is required, FEI and NPD managers alike can look through historical project management data to see how long similar projects have taken. This allows managers on both teams to set realistic expectations regarding turnaround time.
4. Data-backed requests for the funding FEI needs
An issue that often arises in enterprise innovation management is that while executives feel chronically under-informed on the actual returns on innovation investments, FEI managers feel chronically under funded on their projects. This is a vicious impasse. The people doing the FEI work need more money, but when they ask for it, business leaders ask, “How do we know this is a worthwhile investment?” Likewise, when business leaders ask for hard ROI numbers from FEI, they’re told, “It’s not that simple—but we could deliver more results with better funding.”
This impasse exists because, since the 1990s, traditional innovation management has evaluated innovation based on two primary metrics: the portfolio NPV and product vitality index. These metrics almost always fall outside of FEI’s control: they’re not usually the ones responsible for greenlighting new product production, and they’re never the ones actually bringing new products to market. This has made it very difficult to tie FEI’s outputs to success metrics, and, therefore, very difficult to tie FEI spend to success.
(This is a symptom of a much larger issue in innovation management, which we at Wellspring refer to as the Black Box Problem.)
However, two principles of growth innovation methodology help solve this problem.
Committing to growth objectives involves business and innovation managers explicitly attaching every innovation project to one or more of the enterprise’s business objectives. All projects are prioritized based on the objectives they back, and business leaders allocate resources accordingly.
Committing to comprehensive data visibility involves every innovation function of the enterprise (FEI, NPD, and GTM teams) putting their data in one central system. This allows analysts to trace what specific projects have historically contributed to the organization’s success. It also gives FEI access to GTM data (sales, market share, brand affinity, etc.), which FEI managers can then use to make stronger, data-backed business cases for their projects.
How to start implementing growth innovation in FEI now
Implementing growth innovation methodology in your FEI organization can bring you all the benefits described above and then some. But it’s not always easy to know where to start. Our consultants at Wellspring have helped many global enterprises do this—below are some of the more common tactics they’ve employed.
Build an interim internal strategic growth structure
Growth innovation methodology brings benefits to the entire enterprise—but some areas experience faster, more drastic improvements than others. In the first few years, growth innovation’s most noticeable changes (and benefits) tend to manifest in NPD and GTM functions of the business. The shifts and benefits felt in FEI functions tend to bloom a little later.
This means FEI usually isn’t the enterprise’s focus during the beginning stages of growth innovation implementation. The enterprise tends to begin making official implementation moves within NPD, then expand outward into GTM and FEI teams.
However, FEI managers don’t have to wait for the rest of the enterprise. One thing you can do right now is begin explicitly tying FEI projects to corporate objectives and developing an internal philosophy of how FEI contributes to enterprise growth.
This involves the following steps:
- Obtaining enterprise corporate objectives. The obvious place to start is with any official statement of corporate goals and strategy. If such a document is not available (or if it hasn’t been updated in a long time), you may be able to build a makeshift list of executives’ priorities by assessing the content from earnings calls, executive presentations, and the like. You should leave this step with a believable, if not absolutely canonical, list of ways the executive leadership team plans to grow the enterprise.
- Map FEI functions to enterprise growth objectives. Once you have a list of objectives, determine how FEI functions support each one. A simple way to do this would be to sort objectives into three categories: objectives FEI directly supports, objectives FEI indirectly supports, and objectives that FEI activities don’t correspond to. When this is complete, group your active FEI project portfolio by these objectives, assigning projects to the objectives they directly or indirectly support. This will give you an idea of how your current activities align with the enterprise strategy as you understand it.
- Creating an FEI growth strategy. Once you have an idea of where the enterprise is supposed to be heading, and how existing FEI activities contribute to that trajectory, you can start making a plan for how FEI will help it get there. This will involve reverse-engineering FEI-relevant objectives, assessing how FEI can move the enterprise toward each one, and estimating the magnitude of effect FEI activities will (or can) reasonably have. Doing this will allow you to form your own internal means of prioritizing projects, which FEI teams can then use as they pursue research projects and field requests from other parts of the company.
This likely won’t be the final form of your FEI growth innovation strategy—that will come as the enterprise-wide growth innovation implementation campaign unfolds. But doing this now gives your teams a framework for prioritizing efforts, allocating spend, and integrating your projects with other innovation activities. Plus, it gives your teams a head-start on adopting a growth innovation mindset—which will come in very handy later on.
Invest in your own capabilities of estimating R&D value
Growth innovation implementation calls for managers in the NPD pipeline to rethink the metrics they use to evaluate projects. One of the key reasons for this is NPV’s inability to reliably predict a project’s actual returns in the face of compounding unknowns. Instead, innovation leaders need to find other, more dependable ways to gauge a project’s future value.
This is good news for FEI teams. The movement away from NPV-centric decisions creates an opening (and an appetite) for other value-oriented metrics—and that’s an opportunity for you to provide them.
One of the ways you can begin implementing growth innovation methodology in FEI right now is to explore and develop more reliable ways to estimate the potential upsides of research and discovery projects. This may involve creating bespoke indices that assign some quantitative measure to qualitative factors, such as:
- Impact on growth objectives—these metrics project how greatly the project will, if successful, contribute to the enterprise’s overall business strategy.
- Market opportunities—by building internal processes for early market testing, FEI can create metrics to gauge demand for new technologies (or within new-to-the-business markets).
- Internal demand—FEI can also survey stakeholders to quantify how much appetite for a given project already exists within the enterprise.
- Readiness for competitive threats—for big-swing projects, it can be helpful to quantify the competitive implications of not exploring certain new technologies and markets.
By developing internal metrics, FEI can help the rest of the enterprise more comprehensively and strategically evaluate the innovation portfolio—and these metrics can help FEI teams prioritize projects internally too.
Integrate FEI talent throughout the innovation pipeline
Innovation functions are typically siloed across the enterprise—growth innovation seeks to reintegrate them. One way you can accelerate this process for FEI is to find opportunities for intentional cross-functional collaboration on projects all the way down the innovation pipeline.
One way that enterprises have accomplished this is by designating FEI experts to stay involved in projects after they leave the front end of the pipeline, providing input throughout the development and launch lifecycle. This ensures that as significant new products are created, there’s always someone on hand who can provide early-stage context to the rest of the team.
This isn’t always a full-time role, as the need for expert input will wax and wane as the project moves through various phases. The role’s primary purpose is to maintain a sense of continuity from conception to launch, keeping prototyping, market testing, manufacturing, marketing, and sales activities grounded in the initial research that spawned the project in the first place.
This practice works both ways: you can include NPD and GTM experts in FEI processes too. Involving the trifecta of innovation management functions throughout a major project’s journey through the pipeline keeps every team involved aware of how the new technology works, how it’s built, and how it needs to perform in the market.
Take the leap into growth innovation
Implementing growth innovation in your enterprise is a long, but rewarding process. A key part of rolling out this new approach to innovation management is building a healthy culture of growth innovation thinking in FEI and the rest of the organization.
We’ve listed a few practical ways you can start implementing growth innovation in your FEI teams here, but if you’re curious about how to instill this philosophy across every innovation function, we have resources to help you do that too:
- This overview of the growth innovation mindset and its implications on every innovation function in the company.
- The Enterprise Growth Innovation Readiness Scorecard, which will give you a quick assessment of how aligned your organization already is to growth innovation methodology
Just like Doc’s flux capacitor powered every jump, growth innovation powers your FEI team - fueling breakthroughs that keep innovation moving and your growth engine firing.
If you want to explore specific ways you can implement growth innovation in your enterprise, we’d love to help you do this. Book a free discovery consultation with a Wellspring consultant today!