Every thriving enterprise is built on more than good ideas, it’s built on structure. On plans. On alignment between vision and execution. But too often, innovation efforts feel like scattered construction sites: teams laying foundations without blueprints, erecting towers with no idea what they’re supporting, and burning through materials on projects that were never structurally sound to begin with.
To build for growth, you need more than projects. You need a portfolio held together by strategy.
That’s where the 4 A’s of innovation portfolio management come in. This model offers a strategic framework to 'Articulate' your growth plan, 'Allocate' resources accordingly, 'Align' ongoing work, and 'Analyze' results, creating a strong, adaptive structure that supports innovation at every stage.
Ready to put some steel in your strategy? In this blog, we’ll explore how to architect an innovation portfolio that’s built on purpose, reinforced with process, and ready to scale like a skyscraper.
Long-term enterprise success depends on your ability to rapidly and consistently generate, produce, and capitalize on new ideas. To do this, you and your organization must strategically coordinate innovation processes—keeping the entire innovation pipeline working in harmony and recognizing how progress (or lack of progress) in one area impacts another.
This is the objective of innovation portfolio management. It streamlines innovation and keeps an organization’s collection of innovation projects on track and aligned with an overarching strategy. In this article, we’ll examine:
- The role of an innovation portfolio and what managing it entails
- The relationship between growth innovation and portfolio management
- “The 4As” model of innovation portfolio management
- How software vastly improves innovation portfolio management
Let’s start by clarifying the components of an innovation portfolio.
What is an innovation portfolio?
An innovation portfolio is the collection of projects and work activities that represent an organization’s efforts to produce and profit from new products. At any given time, enterprises can have thousands of innovation-related projects in their portfolio at various stages of development, distributed across numerous teams and stakeholders. While enterprises organize and describe the stages of their innovation lifecycle in different ways, innovation portfolios generally include projects that fall under three main categories: front-end innovation (FEI) ideas, new product development (NPD) projects, and commercialized offerings.
FEI encompasses projects at the earliest stages of the innovation lifecycle, such as idea-gathering campaigns, research initiatives, and outright invention. As ideas emerge, FEI makes the business case for them and determines the resources required to turn each idea into a new product. Once FEI has sufficiently vetted an idea, it reaches the go/no-go approval gate, where the enterprise makes one of the following decisions:
- Allocates the necessary resources for the idea to proceed to NPD
- Terminates the idea
- Places the idea “on hold” to revisit at a later time
NPD is where innovation research progresses from exploring possibilities to actively pursuing and producing them. It may involve partnerships with universities and other organizations to research new materials, capabilities, or concepts. It often requires overhauling or reconfiguring factories and manufacturing facilities, as well as extensive prototyping and testing.
After a product has been developed and finalized, it’s still part of the innovation portfolio—it just progresses to the “go-to-market” or commercialization stage of the pipeline. These projects focus on scaling production, launching the product, and establishing the product within the product catalog and broader market. Once a new product is released, projects relating to its commercialization remain part of the innovation portfolio for a period that varies from one enterprise to another.
While the various components of an innovation portfolio operate independently and can often feel disconnected, these disparate projects significantly impact one another. And that’s why innovation portfolio management is so vital to an enterprise’s growth.
What is innovation portfolio management?
Innovation portfolio management is a facet of innovation management that focuses on the process of overseeing an organization’s entire collection of innovation-related projects. It’s how enterprises ensure that their aggregate innovation efforts are:
- Making the most of opportunities available to them
- Aligned with and contributing to overall business objectives
Enterprises have finite resources to expend on (arguably) infinite opportunities for innovation. By setting clear objectives for an innovation portfolio, companies can select and invest in projects based on their alignment and impact. This also helps individual projects retain better focus by empowering stakeholders to prioritize their efforts around the objectives of the broader portfolio.
Effectively managing an innovation portfolio also requires stakeholders to measure and monitor the portfolio’s overall performance. They need visibility into bottlenecks, dead ends, and progress across each stage of the innovation lifecycle, so they can make adjustments as needed and recognize how innovation opportunities affect each other. With clear objectives and visibility into innovation data, enterprises can calibrate their activities to keep their innovation portfolio in sync with the company strategy. And at Wellspring, we believe every innovation strategy should have a singular focus: growth.
Growth innovation & portfolio management
Growth innovation is a new philosophy of innovation management that sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome and manages the entire innovation process accordingly. This approach applies to the entire innovation portfolio: coordinating efforts to optimize for growth both at the individual project level and in aggregate. It’s what your portfolio should be optimized for. This approach relies on three distinct, interdependent principles:
- Growth: Articulating measurable targets in the innovation strategy and explicitly connecting every innovation activity to at least one of those targets.
- Visibility: Centralizing all innovation management data in one place and giving every stakeholder access to the information they need.
- Orchestration: Making every decision in the context of a portfolio-level growth strategy.
We call this the innovation trifecta. Here’s how it works.
1. Growth should be the driving force behind all innovation activity
If growth is the most important outcome of innovation, then every project in your innovation portfolio needs to be directly connected to at least one tangible growth target. Your innovation strategy should formally define how your company will measure growth, and at every stage of the innovation pipeline, innovation teams should be able to connect their project and its related activities to a concrete growth outcome—and the KPIs they’re held accountable to should reflect those connections.
2. Transparency and visibility should be the norm
One of the main challenges with innovation portfolio management is that at most enterprises, innovation is a black box where no one can see the status of other innovation projects. LOB owners and other leadership don’t know how their new requests and reprioritization may impact other work in progress or how past innovation projects have performed. FEI teams don’t know what’s happening with the opportunities they identify and push through. And at the other end of the innovation pipeline, stakeholders don’t know where projects are being held up.
Centralizing innovation data from ideas, timelines, budgeting, approvals, strategic work, and other documentation relating to each project makes it possible to monitor and optimize your entire innovation portfolio for growth targets. Across the innovation lifecycle, everyone can identify pain points that are inhibiting growth and fast track the ideas that have the greatest potential.
3. Orchestration is essential to optimize for growth
Every innovation project at every stage of the pipeline carries an opportunity cost. You have finite personnel, facilities, time, and resources to devote to some combination of projects. With shared growth targets and documented connections between each innovation idea and specific growth outcomes, enterprises can coordinate their innovation efforts across the portfolio.
Orchestrating innovation activities means considering how the ripples of one project affect the rest of the portfolio, and making growth-oriented decisions with these effects in mind. As you examine the innovation pipeline, you should be able to anticipate disruptions before they occur and make adjustments to mitigate them, keeping the pipeline working toward growth.
But this can’t simply be a top-down process. As innovation workers encounter problems or reach dead ends, a shared growth-minded approach encourages them to maintain visibility into their work so that they, as a resource, can be reallocated as needed toward the projects that are expected to generate the most growth.
Leading enterprises have already adopted a growth innovation framework, and they’re using it to improve pipeline throughput, reduce time to market, and increase innovation ROI. In our free ebook, The Growth Innovation Trifecta: A New Philosophy of Innovation Management, we examine the three pillars of growth innovation in greater detail. Check it out.
The 4As model of growth innovation portfolio management
Growth innovation requires innovation stakeholders and workers to maintain a cohesive vision for the innovation portfolio and continually prioritize growth. Enterprises don’t need to reinvent their innovation processes to apply this new approach to innovation management. You just need to utilize the four As: articulate, allocate, align, and analyze. Whatever innovation systems you employ, the 4As approach establishes a cyclical process for keeping your innovation portfolio focused on growth.
Articulate the innovation portfolio strategy
Growth innovation starts with providing high-level clarity about your company’s strategy and how your innovation portfolio should support it. Every person should be able to connect their work to the strategy, and every project should be selected and measured accordingly.
However you organize your portfolio, part of formalizing your innovation portfolio strategy involves defining its parameters and the way ideas progress through the pipeline. When should an idea be recognized as an FEI project—the moment an LOB owner requests it, or a particular stage of the vetting process? What are the borders between an FEI project and an NPD project? How do you hand off this responsibility as ideas pass through your various stages? Once an idea has become a new product, when does it leave the innovation portfolio and join the regular product portfolio? Innovation is often nebulous by nature; adding definition to the ecosystem makes it easier to communicate how each component can contribute to growth.
Next you need to translate your company strategy into a strategy for growth-related innovation initiatives. Should your portfolio be weighted toward adjacent product categories, or double down on categories you’re already winning? What mix of short-, mid-, and long-term projects best suits your broader strategy? And how many active projects should you have in the FEI, NPD, and commercialization stages at a given time?
Distilling your innovation strategy from your broader company strategy and then explicitly defining what that looks like for your innovation pipeline enables you to prioritize initiatives based on their relationship to the strategy. It should be clear to stakeholders and innovation teams that the initiatives that best support and align with the strategy get higher priority. It doesn’t matter how frequently or recently an initiative is requested, if it doesn’t support the strategy (meaning it doesn’t have a clear connection to your company’s plan for growth), it doesn’t get prioritized.
For each project, your timelines and KPIs should be specific, measurable, and tied to the growth innovation strategy. If innovation project timelines don’t fit the strategy, your portfolio won’t be in alignment. And if you measure the success or failure of projects and roles based on KPIs that don’t relate to growth, your work won’t be optimized around growth. For example, focusing on project throughput rates or approvals may cause some “zombie projects” to languish in the pipeline when they should be closed so teams can move on to other projects.
Allocate resources, prioritizing for growth potential
If growth is your top priority for innovation, your innovation budget should reflect that. The innovation strategy you’ve articulated should guide how you distribute resources across your innovation portfolio, including the initiatives you support, the projects you fund, and how funding is spread throughout the pipeline.
Properly allocating resources according to your innovation strategy is far easier when enterprises normalize visibility into innovation data. Decision-makers can see how funds have been distributed in the past, and where lack of funding has caused the greatest delays.
While you don’t want to waste resources you could be using, it’s also important to recognize the value of saving funds you may need later for adjustments and innovation-related needs that may arise later. Allocating all of your available resources may mean funding lower-priority projects that aren’t expected to generate much growth, leaving no room for high-priority projects with significant growth potential later in the year. A lack of reserve also runs the risk of high-growth projects getting derailed by easy-to-fix snags. A reserve fund gives you greater flexibility to adjust and pivot over time—and by maintaining visibility into the process, you’ll learn how large that fund should be.
Align activities to maximize growth
Once you’ve articulated your innovation strategy and allocated resources accordingly, you need to continually align ongoing innovation work with that strategy. This is where every innovation team and stakeholder needs to understand and embrace your growth innovation framework. Everyone should easily recognize how their work supports one or more of the growth innovation objectives, so they can advocate for projects and rationalize priorities based on their relationship to the company strategy.
As innovation projects progress through the pipeline, portfolio managers need to see the interdependencies between steps and coordinate schedules to not just push projects through, but to push through the projects that have the highest growth potential without hampering other projects’ success. In order to maximize growth, you have to consistently maintain alignment between the work being done across the innovation portfolio and the broader innovation strategy. This will require regular reviews of the portfolio and the status of all innovation projects to ensure that timelines, spend, and portfolio mix still fit the innovation strategy.
Analyze performance to find growth opportunities
You can’t optimize your innovation portfolio for growth without analysis. And this is where most enterprises really struggle: they don’t have comprehensive visibility into their innovation data. Businesses leading the way in growth innovation have invested in innovation management solutions (like Accolade) to centralize their innovation data and unlock greater analytics and optimization capabilities.
When all your innovation portfolio data is accessible, you can examine successful projects to see why they’ve worked, so you can replicate and even normalize that success with other projects. Similarly, you can take a closer look at underperforming and failed projects to identify trends in what went wrong.
Your analysis may reveal inefficiencies at particular stages in the innovation lifecycle, or trends in the types of projects that cause delays (and thus inhibit growth), or situations where dependencies tend to cause ripple effects across the portfolio—for better or for worse. Innovation managers need to leverage this high-level visibility by applying their findings to other projects, and allowing their analysis to refine the overall growth innovation portfolio strategy.
The 4As model of growth innovation portfolio management creates a cycle, continuously Articulating, Allocating, Aligning, and Analyzing your innovation portfolio to optimize for growth. As you can imagine, enterprises that have the tools they need to monitor and analyze their innovation pipeline are already using this model to pull ahead and grow faster than the competition. In fact, according to a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study conducted by Forrester in 2024, enterprises that use Accolade to manage their innovation portfolios launch one additional new product within their first five years of adoption and decrease time to market by 15–30%.
Innovation portfolio management software helps with every step
The 4As model is an intuitive, logical process for ensuring your innovation pipeline prioritizes growth. But while it’s straightforward in principle, most enterprises are poorly equipped to apply this process to their own portfolios. Innovation management software helps facilitate every piece of the 4As model by establishing a centralized system for all your innovation data.
If you want innovation stakeholders throughout the organization to connect your innovation portfolio to growth, your strategy and the KPIs by which you measure success can’t be buried in a folder, email thread, report, or slide deck. Accolade helps you articulate your innovation strategy in two key ways:
- Providing a relevant location for stakeholders to access strategic documents
- Letting you create custom dashboards that automatically display real-time progress toward your targets and KPIs
That visibility extends to your resource allocation, too. Accolade enables you to visualize how funds have been allocated across your innovation portfolio, so you can see if your current distribution fits with your strategy. You’ll also see each project’s spend versus budget, so you can tell where you’re running low on funds, and where there’s excess.
As you work to align innovation activities around your growth strategy, Accolade shows you the relationships between projects, so you can see how progress and delays in one project impact other parts of your portfolio. Innovation stakeholders can collaborate on projects while recognizing how their work supports the whole system of innovation. And you can create automated alerts to help managers address pain points in regular reviews.
By bringing all of your innovation data into one place and establishing visibility across the entire innovation organization, Accolade enables you to analyze your innovation portfolio in powerful new ways. You can create custom dashboards for each role, so stakeholders automatically see the KPIs that are most relevant to them. And when they want a deeper understanding of costs, budgets, timelines, and progress, they can filter your innovation data to see what’s working and what’s holding projects back.
At any given time, an enterprise is going to have innovation projects that have stalled out and are inhibiting growth. A traditional framework, unfortunately, can incentivize innovation workers to keep these projects open and “in progress,” leaving other stakeholders unaware of the opportunity to realign their efforts and reallocate crucial innovation resources. But with the 4As model and Accolade’s visibility into innovation data, you’re equipped to see these opportunities to pivot early, and innovation workers are motivated to transition to other high impact projects.
It’s time to invest in growth innovation
Growth innovation is giving enterprises a major advantage. They’re growing faster, and managing their innovation portfolios more efficiently. The whole point of innovation is to generate growth, and when you have the visibility you need to monitor that growth and actively align your labor and resources around with that outcome, the entire innovation system works more effectively.
You don’t have to reinvent your innovation process. You just need a better system for bringing your innovation data together and organizing it in meaningful ways. As the leading solution for innovation portfolio management, Accolade is at the forefront of this shift in innovation management. Enterprises that use Accolade reduce their time to market by 15–30% and on average release one additional new product every five years.
Book a demo today to see how Accolade can help you get more from your innovation portfolio.