In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, every origin story shapes the hero’s superpower. The same goes for innovation leaders. If you cut your teeth in the front end of innovation (FEI), your powers lie in anticipating disruption, sensing opportunity before the market does, and conjuring up what’s next from scratch.
But here’s the plot twist: the age of solo vigilantes is over. We’ve entered the Growth Innovation era: a high-stakes crossover event where silos must fall, data must flow, and collaboration is the ultimate power move. To lead the charge, FEI alumni must evolve from lone inventors to enterprise integrators.
This blog is your guide to that transformation. We’ll unpack how your FEI background gives you a serious edge and how to level up by breaking old habits, syncing with NPD and GTM squads, and turning your insight engine into an enterprise-wide growth generator.
As an innovation leader with an FEI background, you have a unique opportunity to help propel your organization into the second generation of innovation management, a shift characterized by the following trends:
- Realigning innovation activities around enterprise growth objectives
- Reintegrating innovation functions across the enterprise
- Restructuring and unifying current and historical innovation management data
The growth innovation management philosophy is all about implementing these shifts in the enterprise. To do this, you’re going to need to tear down silos with new product development (NPD) and go-to-market (GTM) departments so you can integrate and align with them more productively. And that means recognizing and responding to some of the perspectives—and even baggage—you’ve picked up from your time in FEI.
How Innovation Leaders Emerge and Why FEI Backgrounds Stand Out
Very few people who end up managing enterprise innovation started their careers thinking, “I want to be an innovation manager.” Most of the folks in these positions instead graduate into leadership from one of three specific backgrounds:
- Front-end innovation (engineering, traditional research and development, concept development, market research, etc.)
- New product development (manufacturing, industrial design, quality assurance, product management, etc.)
- Go-to-market solutions (marketing, sales, business development, customer success, etc.)
Each one of these backgrounds brings inherent strengths to innovation leadership. But they also come from environments that are traditionally siloed from the priorities and focus of the others. That means that as you help your enterprise transition into the growth innovation age, you’ll need to be keenly aware of the specific strengths your background brings to the mix—and you’ll also need to check for blind spots that innovation leaders from FEI backgrounds commonly deal with.
How FEI Leaders Can Turn Their Strengths Into Enterprise Growth
Innovation leaders with a history in front-end innovation come to the position with unique attributes and strengths. By leaning into those qualities, you set your teams up for success throughout every stage of the innovation cycle. More importantly, these attributes equip you to implement the kind of changes needed to transition your organization toward innovation’s next generation.
You’re ahead of the curve, anticipating disruption
Companies are built upon specific products and services and unique approaches to a vision, a leadership structure, a focus, policies, and a corporate culture. But the things that make an enterprise successful will hamstring it over time as market conditions and technologies change.
The role of front-end innovation is to anticipate those changes and get ahead of them. This means discovering potentially disruptive new technologies, adapting to customer’s changing expectations, and anticipating seismic shifts in the market. Being the first to find and exploit these opportunities is the name of the game for FEI.
You’ve become adept at identifying emerging trends, anticipating customer needs, and recognizing potential market gaps. To your colleagues in other functions of the enterprise, this might come off as a sixth sense for anticipating internal and external changes before they occur. Your particular skills in these areas may have even been the reason you were put in leadership to begin with.
It’s easy to see the value of these skills when they’re pointed outward toward the marketplace, but they get even more valuable as you focus those skills on the organization itself. Learning to anticipate the needs of new product development and go-to-market services helps you prepare for the expectations and requests you can expect from others. It also helps you identify the data that will best serve their needs.
You’ve internalized the research and invention process
More than almost anyone else in the organization, you know how things are discovered. You understand how they’re tested and approved. You grasp both the perceptions and realities associated with identifying market opportunities and conceptualizing new-to-market solutions.
You also understand the risks of getting it wrong, leading to initial prototypes or service offerings followed by gathering feedback and refining ideas until they’re ready to meet demand.
It’s no wonder that enterprises will tap people with FEI backgrounds to manage organizational innovation. Their intuitive strengths, technical expertise, and hard-earned experience are a near-perfect match for the position’s requirements.
The goal here is to use this knowledge to craft KPIs that are distinct for each project and phase-specific. You understand that success looks different for every project and in every phase of the development and launch timeline, and this knowledge can help you develop metrics that matter for each project and phase. The next generation of innovation management will not require every project in your innovation portfolio be shoehorned into metrics that don’t fit. It will require a more fluid approach to KPIs that correctly identifies what success looks like in every stage of the pipeline.
But to get to the second generation of innovation management and ideate in a way that ensures you’re regularly meeting enterprise growth objectives, you’ll need to mitigate some weaknesses, too.
How to Overcome Legacy FEI Habits in Today’s Innovation Landscape
Along with the skills and knowledge you have picked up from your FEI experience, you’ve likely picked up some preconceived ideas and attitudes that will become obstacles to managing innovation effectively in the era of growth innovation.
The challenge is that they’re hard-earned ideas that made sense in an FEI context but won’t necessarily lend themselves to meeting the demands of today’s innovation portfolio, and holding onto these assumptions will make it harder to implement growth innovation methodology.
Keeping innovation under wraps
Front-end innovators often feel the need to operate in stealth mode. It can be excruciating to pour energy into early development and feel like you’re under scrutiny from other departments (like finance) who don’t really have the patience, buy-in, or wherewithal to support an unproven concept. This tension contributes to a covert culture where FEI departments camouflage projects until they feel they have enough data to justify them.
There’s some historical precedent and rationale behind this. Of all the innovation functions in the enterprise, FEI most often carries the mantle from the glory days of research and development. During the golden age of innovation (1940s–1980s), corporations recognized that one new innovation could define the success and future of the business for decades. So they kept placing bets at R&D’s roulette table, knowing that the right spin would deliver a fortune—and R&D enjoyed an enormous amount of autonomy as they chased new theories and ideas.
As corporate priorities shifted to providing short-term value to stockholders, taking big risks for potential future payouts fell out of fashion. This became the first generation of innovation management (1990s–present), ushering in a shift in priorities and focus. R&D’s long leash was cut short, and they could no longer chase every possibility. Opportunities needed to be justified upfront, and FEI was expected to create magic from paper-thin budgets. And even while C-level executives looked at the “fuzzy front end” as a complete mystery, they were still trying to wrangle it into a budgetary line item they could justify to stockholders.
In the meantime, the engineers and researchers who got into innovation due to the nostalgic romanticism of R&D’s golden age are driven by two significant motivations: (1) the thrill of chasing opportunities and concepts and (2) the conviction that a huge win can earn them more trust, bigger budgets, and a longer leash. Because of this, corporate pressure has inadvertently created a culture wherein FEI teams keep their best ideas in stealth mode until the business case is strong enough for those ideas to get a fair shot.
As someone tasked to lead in this new generation of innovation management, eschewing this cloak-and-dagger mindset is critical. It was a lot easier to operate covertly when the front end was fuzzy. In a post-data world, managing projects this way is just more trouble than it’s worth. But the more significant consideration is that stealth mode only really works in siloes. Second-generation innovation management requires these walls to come down as these disparate departments work in tandem to meet growth objectives.
To evolve in the ways you facilitate innovation, you’ll need to go through some specific shifts that are counterintuitive to siloed responsibilities and carefully protected projects.
Shift one: Realign FEI Objectives with Strategic Growth Outcomes
Being less than transparent during the R&D phase makes it difficult for executives to know how FEI is working to meet their long-term high-risk and high-reward objectives. More clarity from the outset helps demonstrate the extent of FEIis thought process in their decision-making and how they intend to meet the company’s growth objectives.
Shift Two: Build Cross-Functional Collaboration Across FEI, NPD & GTM
By sequestering new projects until FEI feels they can be adequately justified, they also preclude other stakeholders from offering feedback that could actually strengthen the concept. GTM teams might have insights from customer behavior studies or NPD might be able to offer valuable VoC notes. This cross-pollination can give FEI more critical data to draw from and help justify the validity of a project faster than if it was kept in isolation.
Shift three: Centralize Innovation Data to Accelerate Business Decisions
If executives can’t see how projects in their infancy will be used to further growth objectives down the line, it becomes more difficult for them to provide the budgetary resources FEI needs to move things down the pipeline. By sharing ideas and corresponding data earlier, stakeholders have a much better understanding of the entire scope of a project.
A quick caveat: There are times when some secrecy is common sense. Some projects should be covert, and it’s imperative to protect them from any leaks that might sink them. But knowing FEI is working on "Project X" in support of "Objective A" is better than leaving business stakeholders wondering, "Wait, where's this money going? Why doesn't FEI have the capacity to work on the requests I’ve sent them?"
The struggle to get the organization pulling in the same direction
In a siloed world, it makes sense that FEI would keep to themselves and work covertly on some projects until they could build a bulletproof case that executives have to entertain. But that fosters an us-vs.-them culture, which breeds skepticism on both sides.
The way forward lies in de-siloing and working closely with other FEI teams and other departments, sharing data and building cross-functional buy-in from the ground up. It can be difficult to win attention and budget for the prognostications of FEI alone, but it’s a lot easier when GTM and NPD teams share the same vision for the future.
When new product development doesn’t have visibility into FEI processes, they will struggle to adequately understand how much time, money, and effort it takes to discover or invent something. This means they don’t really see any problem dropping high-urgency requests on FEI’s doorstep. This leads to FEI constantly reorganizing who is working on what project, and deadlines for every project simply becoming a suggestion.
Leaders transitioning from FEI backgrounds need to actively foster collaboration and create efficient workflows that empower FEI teams to develop cutting-edge technologies. This necessitates a shift from a siloed approach (requests coming “over the wall” from NPD to FEI) towards a transparent model that provides both FEI and NPD with visibility into each other's work. This transformation requires a clear vision and dedicated effort from leadership to integrate these distinct processes seamlessly.
This vision-sharing happens as innovation managers commit to more comprehensive data-sharing between the various innovation function families (FEI, NPD, and GTM). This gives executives more historical context for past FEI success while allowing FEI to draw from broader data sets to justify their focus and projects. When FEI can access GTM data related to brand affinity, customer behavior, customer acquisition, and market penetration, they’re better positioned to make forecasts and set goals aligned with enterprise growth strategies. And as lateral innovation teams have access to FEI data, they’re better able to support and augment FEI vision.
The value of cross-functional integration
In innovation’s first generation, it made sense to circle the wagons. R&D was no longer at the center of the business, and front-end innovation became open to scrutiny of other business units. In some cases, the fuzziness of FEI attracted more scrutiny. The impulse to hold onto some level of autonomy by running interference with other departments while carefully and judiciously exposing what teams are working on makes sense.
But as innovation evolves, those silos need to come down. One way that this can be done is to encourage FEI engagement throughout the various stages of a project. Having an FEI expert involved in development and marketing ensures FEI has a better understanding of the entire project lifecycle, enabling more realistic planning for projects that clearly scale up to corporate objectives and are, therefore, more easily greenlit.
Conversely, when GTM and NPD become more involved in the front-end processes, it helps remove some of the mystery from that part of the innovation process, allowing GTM and NPD a better understanding of an entire product lifecycle, creating more cross-pollination between disciplines, and building more vigorous advocacy across the board.
Transform your innovation process for the next generation
The next evolutionary step for innovation management revolves around growth innovation, which ensures that an enterprise’s growth objectives are the driving motivation for every decision at every stage of the innovation process. This allies the innovation-heavy departments with the rest of the organization, ensuring that efforts are coordinated and aligned around the enterprise’s short-term and long-term growth.
If you’re wondering how to start moving in this direction, here are a couple of smart places to start:
- Read The Growth Innovation Trifecta, our introductory guide to the principles of growth innovation and how this innovation management philosophy transforms every aspect of the enterprise’s innovation organization (including FEI).
- Check out how Accolade can help you reintegrate innovation teams and unify your ideas, timelines, budgets, approvals, strategy, and other project management data in one central system, making it easier to evaluate projects and replicate results. We’d love to show you how it works — schedule a free consultation today!