In the high-stakes game of enterprise innovation, governance used to be the rulebook, important, yes, but mostly sitting on the sidelines. But as the game has evolved, so has its role.
Governance is no longer just keeping score or enforcing boundaries. It’s calling plays, shaping strategy, and actively steering the team toward growth.
Welcome to the next generation of innovation governance, where the framework isn’t just reactive, it’s orchestrated. And growth isn’t just an outcome, it’s the objective embedded in every pass, pivot, and portfolio move.
Let’s break down how growth innovation is turning governance from a passive referee into the ultimate playmaker, and changing the entire enterprise playbook in the process.
Working in innovation requires navigating ambiguities and uncertainties. You’re experimenting with novel ideas to test their potential and developing new procedures to bring them to fruition. At the same time, there isn’t unlimited time and resources for trial and error, so this unpredictability and fuzziness requires some guardrails—and that’s where governance comes in.
Governance is the framework of principles, policies, and processes that guide and oversee innovation activities within an enterprise. It defines what strategic alignment looks like and how innovative ideas are generated, evaluated, funded, and ultimately implemented. It also determines how risks are identified, assessed, and mitigated, outlining contingency protocols for potential setbacks. Governance establishes standards for measuring and evaluating innovation projects, creating metrics to track their progress from start to finish.
It’s one of the six disciplines facilitating the innovation process from beginning to end. Alongside governance, the integral innovation disciplines include prioritization, roadmapping, methodology, enablement, and reporting. Each discipline plays a distinct role in innovation, but they work cooperatively to get projects through the pipeline and into the market. Throughout the entire process, governance is helping to keep everything on track.
Every enterprise’s governance impacts how they wield the other innovation management disciplines. Because we see a shift happening in how innovation needs to be managed, our focus here is on the ways that growth innovation prepares governance for this shift, and how this transformation will impact the other disciplines.
What is growth innovation?
Growth innovation is an innovation management philosophy that sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome and manages every step of the innovation process accordingly. It treats the entire innovation portfolio as a unified, cohesive business case where every initiative and decision is interconnected, impacting the portfolio as a whole.
It requires that everyone within the innovation system understands and aligns with the enterprise’s growth objectives, has a firm grasp of their role and responsibilities, and has access to the necessary data to contribute effectively.
The whole growth innovation approach hinges on three non-negotiable principles:
- Growth
Defining the enterprise’s growth objectives and identifying revenue gaps is essential. Ultimately, every single innovation activity will seek to address these gaps and align with these objectives. - Visibility
All innovation management data is consolidated into a single system, serving as the canonical source of information for all ideation, experimentation, development, and launch data. This ensures that every stakeholder has access to the information they need to coordinate innovation efforts in support of enterprise goals. Maintaining and distributing this data is crucial for sustaining visibility. - Orchestration
All strategic innovation decisions are made with the portfolio in mind. Interdependencies across the portfolio are managed to optimize resource allocation and minimize conflicts. Regular reviews are conducted on individual projects, as well as on the portfolio as a whole. This ensures that timely adjustments can be made and that all activities are meeting enterprise growth objectives.
For a deeper understanding of these principles, download a free copy of our ebook “The Growth Innovation Trifecta.”
The benefits of growth innovation
In the summer of 2024, Wellspring commissioned a Forrester Consulting study to examine how clients adapted their innovation strategies after adopting Accolade. The study aimed to identify some valuable best practices for users, but it ultimately uncovered a comprehensive innovation management approach that yielded significant results. We have come to refer to this approach as growth innovation.
This approach led to a notable increase in product launches—one major net-new product every five years, on average—along with a 15% faster time to market, a 10% decrease in project management budget, and a 1% increase in profit margin from product enhancements. These outcomes resulted from implementing the three principles outlined above, which we refer to as growth innovation.
If you’re interested in digging deeper into this report, you can download the Forrester study.
We discovered that the benefits derived from growth innovation necessitate shifting away from the mindsets prevalent in previous generations of innovation management. Let’s look at some of the preceding generational attitudes around innovation governance, and what needs to change to facilitate growth innovation.
How governance needs to evolve in growth innovation
Enterprise innovation has undergone a couple of generational shifts. In innovation’s first generation (1945–1980s), companies like 3M, Dow Chemical, and Proctor & Gamble were wholly invested in bringing new discoveries to market.
The focus was on new technologies and processes rather than solely on market needs. And in this environment, innovation teams got a long leash. A steering committee of top-level executives would often oversee innovation, but as long as R&D was transparent in its processes and accountable to designated outcomes, they were largely autonomous and made their own decisions.
The second generation of innovation (1990s–present) saw a shift focused on immediate shareholder value. Executive leadership, driven by stock incentives, prioritized projects that guaranteed positive results on the following earnings report. The natural consequence was a shift away from higher-risk innovation projects and toward iterations of existing products and larger focus on bringing existing technologies to new markets.
The decision-making structure, resource allocation mechanisms, risk-assessment procedures, and performance metrics that comprised this period’s governance focused on ensuring financial returns for stockholders.
The governance for these two generations effectively supported the priorities of each. However, the tide is shifting away from free-range innovation and short-term shareholder value toward predictable enterprise growth. And governance will need to change to accommodate this development.
Governance in the next generation
Much of the shift to the next generation of innovation will hinge on effective governance. This evolution will mark a change in how organizations manage innovation, moving beyond isolated initiatives to a more interdependent model that’s strategically aligned with the enterprise's growth objectives.
Three critical trends will help usher in this new generation of innovation governance:
1. Realignment of innovation activities around growth objectives
Previously, innovation activities have often been siloed and disconnected from the broader enterprise goals. Governance in this new generation will focus on how the entire innovation portfolio works interdependently to hit specific targets aligned with those goals, explicitly tying innovation activities to (and tracking them against) growth objectives, rather than simply pushing them through the development pipeline and hoping they’ll work out in the market.
2. Reintegrating innovation across the enterprise
Instead of having fractured innovation activities throughout the enterprise, growth-innovation governance will seek to reintegrate these functions and activities. This will result in fewer barriers and increased collaboration among FEI, NPD, and GTM functions. It will also treat the entire innovation portfolio as a complex, interdependent ecosystem where the decisions in one area impact the others.
3. Restructuring and unifying current and historical innovation management data
Every business function and process is becoming more reliant on clear, accurate data, and innovation is no exception. To facilitate productive innovation, governance will need to consolidate the existing and historical innovation data from the various enterprise systems. This new platform not only becomes the authoritative source of documentation about innovation activities past and present, but also an accessible database of governance information and protocols.
Governance will drive the framework, oversight, and process changes necessary to propel innovation into this new generation. But governance is not only driving this change, as a discipline, it will also be transformed by growth innovation’s impact on portfolio management.
Growth innovation transforms how governance works
In more traditional innovation management frameworks, implementing governance can be challenging. Too often, governance is scattered across numerous drives and platforms or stored in files that nobody ever reads, making it difficult to fully grasp its scope. Therefore, instead of being a force for truly directing and aligning innovation processes, governance often ends up being a stack of eye-roll–inducing rules that are inconsistently followed.
By bringing all of your governance into the same platform you use to cache your innovation data, growth innovation makes governance more accessible to the people and systems that need it, restoring it to its rightful place of guidance and oversight.
Let’s dig into some of the specific ways that growth innovation revitalizes the discipline of governance.
Establishing clear governance targets
Governance ultimately provides the framework for how the enterprise adopts growth innovation. It accomplishes this by defining the changes that need to take place for innovation activities to benefit from new practices and processes.
But governance doesn’t simply enable growth innovation: it’s also rejuvenated and elevated to its rightful place in the enterprise innovation ecosystem. No longer merely a tool intended to babysit methodology, governance takes an active hand in shaping the enterprise’s routines, regulations, and regimens, optimizing innovation efficiency and effectiveness. It sets the guardrails for methodology, but also sets the criteria for what projects even make it into the pipeline.
Centralizing and harmonizing governance
When governance is scattered across innovation departments and systems, it’s easy for it to splinter into numerous ad hoc, disconnected regulations and policies. But by overseeing the entire innovation portfolio as a single business case, governance is reintegrated into a singular, coordinated discipline, bringing coherence and consistency to innovation activities.
And it’s not just the policies that become more cohesive; the governance documentation is also consolidated into a single platform for access, understanding, and sharing throughout the enterprise. This means governance doesn’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. Authoritative directives can be accessible to everyone and applied to situations as they arise, rather than being improvised when needed.
Expanding the scope of governance
Growth innovation empowers a more holistic approach to governance. Instead of focusing on individual projects and initiatives, governance encompasses the relationships and interdependencies between all innovation activities. When problems arise and priorities shift, governance establishes rules for course corrections on a project-by-project basis, while also being mindful of the ripple effect felt across the entire portfolio.
Making governance a more material element of enterprise innovation
Too often, governance policies sit in unopened document folders. Multiple parties spend a significant amount of time crafting and documenting these guidelines, but many employees would be hard pressed to know where to find them. Growth innovation integrates and centralizes governance, making it an active, integral part of innovation operations.
Under growth innovation, governance isn’t like a company’s mission statement, which is crafted, uploaded to the website, and then potentially forgotten about. It ensures that governance exists to provide consistent and coherent guidelines for innovation processes.
One way it does this is by establishing regularly scheduled cross-functional portfolio health reviews to assess progress, identify obstacles, and make any necessary adjustments. The rules dictating what is reviewed, the review process, and how to apply information uncovered in these reviews fall under governance’s purview.
This helps ensure that governance is directly tied to innovation activities, and materially relevant to the daily innovation operations.
Governance and other disciplines under growth innovation
Governance is the enterprise discipline that dictates how the other disciplines should function. So it makes sense that we can’t understand how growth innovation impacts governance until we examine the places where governance intersects with the other disciplines.
Prioritization and governance
Under growth innovation, innovation activities are prioritized based on their ability to contribute to enterprise growth objectives and close pre-determined revenue gaps. This simplifies prioritization by subjecting many other prioritization factors to these overarching priorities.
Governance establishes the criteria used for prioritization, ensuring that resources are allocated to the initiatives with the highest potential impact on the organization’s priorities.
Roadmapping and governance
Growth innovation augments the roadmapping discipline by equipping it with the historical data necessary to set timelines and milestones accurately. But problems still arise, priorities can change, and stakeholder expectations can shift. Governance provides the guidance and protocols required to change course without disrupting every other initiative in the pipeline.
Accessible governance ensures that every innovation team member understands how to process and respond to new data in a way that keeps the innovation engine running smoothly.
Enablement and governance
The heart of growth innovation is found at the convergence of enablement and governance. In its most ideal form, governance rules should be hardwired into the enablement tools and systems that drive innovation. This enables a significant amount of compliance to be automated, creating real-time governance input that’s more useful and less bureaucratic.
What every organization wants to avoid is a governance structure that’s more theoretical than operational. The organizational structure should reflect governance protocols. When governance is embodied in its enablement systems, it becomes entwined with the tools and processes empowering innovation.
Methodology and governance
The most effective innovation methodology is one that efficiently moves projects through the pipeline. In principle, this function should be completely agnostic of the project’s purpose or validity. It’s governance that connects the methodology to the enterprise’s goals. When governance works, the pipeline is filled with high-priority, high-impact initiatives, and the methodology can function as intended.
Governance also establishes processes for documenting and disseminating the lessons learned from innovation projects. This means that the learnings from one division’s methodology flow to other divisions and improve their processes.
Making the transition to growth innovation
Growth innovation requires a fundamental shift in the goals that your current governance was crafted to facilitate. To transform your governance framework requires two essential elements:
1. Effective change management
Transitioning toward growth innovation will require new governance policies and procedures, but new governance documents alone will not get you there. You will need buy-in and engagement from everyone remotely connected to innovation.
This means ensuring people understand the rationale for any changes and the enterprise objectives that will be used as innovation targets. If you can help the various innovation team members throughout the organization understand the reasons and benefits of adopting a new framework, it will help people get behind the changes.
Next, training and development initiatives will equip individuals to use new enablement platforms, understand any changes to methodologies, and become acclimated to adjustments in their responsibilities.
2. Centralized innovation management software
The most effective governance policies in the world can’t make up for a lackluster enablement system. Your enablement delivers the infrastructure and resources necessary to make your governance work. And a powerful innovation management software needs to be the nucleus for that system.
The right innovation management software makes your governance easily accessible and shareable to everyone. It brings all of your innovation data together, so that every stakeholder has the visibility necessary to know they’re aligned with protocols. It also automates many of the requirements and regulations, ensuring there is never any confusion about what needs to happen next or how it will impact other projects in the pipeline.
Establish your governance foundation on growth innovation
An evolutionary shift in the management of innovation is underway. Clear, effective governance that oversees all portfolio projects interdependently and propels them to fill revenue gaps and meet enterprise goals will be essential. Growth innovation provides the necessary foundation for this, empowering governance (along with every other discipline) to flourish in this new environment.
Accolade is the enablement tool that brings all your governance together into a single platform, making it more practical and functional for the people who need it. It automates processes, aligning portfolio activities with the policies that govern them, facilitates usable KPIs to help monitor activities, and helps automate contingencies so governance can occur naturally.
Innovation governance exists solely to ensure that innovation activities are coordinated to meet your enterprise’s highest objectives, and Accolade ensures that the guidelines you set are adhered to throughout your organization.
Book a demo of Accolade and discover how the right IM software can transform your portfolio management.