Growth Innovation in the Age of AI

Magic wands are ideal for folklore and movies. Wave one and a pumpkin turns into a carriage or a spectacularly underwhelming sports car becomes the greatest flying time machine of the 1980s. And the plot can move forward. Artificial intelligence has brought about the promise of revolutionary human change, but a magic wand it is not. Cars and jets, too, are amazing feats of human ingenuity — until you run out of fuel. Smartphones are technological marvels except in a deadzone with a dying battery and no USB-C cable. AI is capable of magical results, but it still needs data, direction, and connection to deliver on its promise. 

Consider that there’s a common misconception that market value is a direct product of your R&D spend, but the data suggests otherwise. McKinsey’s 15-year analysis of 5,000 of the world’s largest public companies reveals that, despite record R&D budgets, only about 13% grew by more than 10% annually. Even more telling? Only about 6% achieved sustainable organic growth. 

Any discussion of innovation best practices needs to begin with an understanding that AI is not the solution to this problem. No technology will compensate for a lack of strategic intention. AI may optimize how you execute ideas, but it cannot inherently create the growth an enterprise needs to thrive. 

Growth innovation provides the tracks for the AI to run on. 

Establishing an IM Philosophy That AI Can Enhance

We introduced growth innovation in October 2024 in response to a Forrester Total Economic Impact study we commissioned on Accolade users. This study revealed that a more disciplined approach to innovation yielded: 

• An increase in launch pipeline throughput by one significant new product launch every five years
• Increased profit margin by 1 percentage point from product improvements
• A 15 percent acceleration in time to market
• A project budget savings of 10 percent and a bypass of 20 project manager FTEs

As we combed through these findings, growth innovation as an IM philosophy began to take shape. The philosophy isn’t complicated. It manages the entire portfolio as a unified business case, and sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome, managing every step of the innovation process accordingly. 

Since then, smart innovation managers have rightly asked us, “This framework sounds great, but it doesn’t mention artificial intelligence. Does AI change how we do growth innovation?” 

The answer is both yes and no. AI will fundamentally change how we execute growth innovation, but it doesn’t change how we think about it. The goal and the marching orders are the same. The goal remains growth. AI will be a force magnifier, allowing us to achieve it at a scale and speed previously considered impossible. 

AI and the Three Principles of Growth Innovation

Growth innovation cultures are radically committed to three core principles: 

• Growth: Measurable growth targets are identified and articulated in the innovation strategy, and every innovation activity is linked to at least one of those targets. 
• Visibility: All innovation data is centralized, and every stakeholder has access to the information they need. 
• Orchestration: Every decision is made within the context of a portfolio-level growth strategy. 

The radical adoption of these three principles equips leaders to manage innovation toward predictable growth, but executing on them requires a comprehensive shift in how the organization approaches innovation and the processes it uses to enable it. This can’t be done by AI. You can’t simply prompt AI to “set growth as the single most important output of innovation and manage every part of the innovation process accordingly,” and expect incredible results. 

This doesn’t mean AI won’t impact the execution of these principles. It definitely will. In fact, in the coming weeks we’ll unpack some ways you can expect AI to impact each of them in the following articles: 

• Aligning on Growth in the Age of AI 
• AI Is Transforming Data Visibility, and Innovation Managers Need to Be Ready 
• Innovation Portfolio Orchestration in the Age of AI 

For now, let’s look at the big-picture impacts AI will have on growth innovation. 

How AI Will Augment Growth Innovation Methodology

While the principles of growth innovation are straightforward, executing them at scale is challenging. This is where AI can provide significant benefits, removing many of the cognitive and administrative hurdles for innovation workers. 

AI Can Read Everything Within Your Organization

One of the biggest challenges all innovation enterprises face is the sheer volume of information. Centralizing your data is infinitely more productive than leaving it scattered throughout the organization, but even if every file is tagged, labeled, and indexed, there’s no one in the organization who is familiar with it all. 

Even the most dedicated managers are only marginally familiar with the data for all current projects in the pipeline, let alone the organization’s historical data. Insights remain buried simply because of the overwhelming quantity and complexity of the data. Extracting answers from the system requires someone to have an idea of what they’re looking for and how to build the right report to see it. It’s like having the world’s largest library, but if you want specific answers, you’ll still need to know where to look. 

AI’s ability to ingest incredible amounts of data enables it to act as a librarian that has read every page in that library. It has a comprehensive understanding of your projects from five years ago and the budget meeting from five hours ago. It connects the dots that no human can even see. 

But this librarian isn’t a magician. AI won’t be able to properly connect the dots on data that is poorly structured, tagged, or inconsistently logged. In the age of AI, data discipline will become the fuel that determines whether AI provides a strategic advantage or merely a faster way to find the wrong information. 

Translating Natural-Language Questions Into Complex Calculations

Traditional reporting is fairly rigid. If you want a new view of your data, you usually have to build a complex formula or get help from a specialist. Decisions are delayed because the leaders with the questions lack the skills to pull data from the system, and the technical specialists lack the context to know which data actually matters. 

AI allows anyone to ask simple, natural-language questions, and can create the formulas necessary to answer queries like: 

• “How many new projects are going live next month?” 
• “How many projects have been delayed after we announced layoffs?” 
• “Which of our active projects are most at risk of missing their launch date due to the current supply chain delays in East Asia?” 
• “What is the total R&D spend for the last two quarters on projects we eventually killed?” 

The answers to simple questions like this won’t require someone to create an elaborate formula. AI will do that work for you. 

AI Can Recognize Similarities and Prompt Actions

Aligning thousands of innovation activities around your corporate objectives is no small task. Even with a clear strategy, no single person has consistently aligned every task, project, and budget line to those targets. 

But by feeding AI your specific targets, constraints, and initiatives, it will perform critical tasks that will help: 

• Automated association: AI will scan your portfolio for activities and projects that may not be directly tied to an initiative, alerting team members and suggesting closely related objectives they might be linked to. 
• Detecting strategic drift: With all the moving parts, it’s easy to miss when projects drift from their intended targets, or there’s a change in their scope, and by the time you recognize the problem, you’re burning resources. AI can recognize the moment things are out of alignment and raise the alarm, prompting swift intervention. 
  

Prepare for the AI Era With Accolade

If these AI-driven benefits were ready tomorrow, would your enterprise be able to benefit from them? Not if your data is spread across multiple platforms and siloed departments. The competitive edge will go to organizations prepared to leverage this technology. 

Accolade innovation management software provides the infrastructure for the AI era. By centralizing your data and optimizing your processes with Accolade, you’re preparing your organization to capitalize on these changes with: 

• Centralized, structured data: 
  Accolade unifies historical and current innovation data into a highly configurable system. This gives AI a perfect environment to read, ingest, and connect the dots across your entire organization. 
• Operational visibility: 
  By capturing every meeting, decision, budget shift, and project update in real-time, you create a foundation that AI can use to instantly answer any questions that might arise about your pipeline and portfolio mix. 
• Orchestrational foundation: 
  Accolade is already an ideal tool for automating processes and governance while making it easier to identify problems. AI supercharges these capabilities, making orchestration easier, faster, and more effective. 

Innovation organizations with centralized, well-organized data will have a massive head start. It’s time to prepare for the revolution. 
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