Innovation is having its “next big shift” moment. Enterprises are no longer content with siloed R&D efforts, disjointed launches, or innovation that doesn’t clearly connect to growth. The pressure is on to treat innovation as a fully integrated business discipline: measured, aligned, and accountable.
For GTM professionals, this shift should feel familiar. You’ve always been the ones to translate vision into traction, to prove that strategy leads to revenue. And now, those instincts are exactly what’s needed upstream.
Of course, innovation leaders don’t all arrive from the same place. Some come from the lab bench, others from product development, and many, like you, from GTM functions such as sales enablement or product marketing.
Innovation leaders come from a range of positions within the innovation pipeline, including go-to-market (GTM) functions at the tail end. Maybe you have stepped into innovation leadership from a role like sales enablement specialist or product marketing manager. Your GTM background can uniquely equip you in your role as an innovation leader to move your organization into the next generation of innovation management. This evolution is characterized by three major shifts:
- 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 sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome, and manages every step of the innovation process accordingly. This requires tearing down silos between GTM, new product development (NPD), and front-end innovation (FEI) functions so that the entire innovation portfolio can be managed with greater clarity and alignment.
But to do that, you’ll need to leverage all the strengths you bring to the table from your GTM background—and you’ll also probably need to let go of some old GTM perspectives you’ve accumulated.
How do people get into innovation leadership?
The great majority of today’s innovation managers were promoted into their position. They didn’t sit in their dorm as college freshmen mapping out a plan to manage enterprise innovation someday. Like you, they likely arrived through one of three on-ramps:
- Front-end innovation (engineering, traditional research and development, concept development, market research, etc.)
- New product development (industrial design, quality assurance, product management, etc.)
- Go-to-market solutions (marketing, sales, business development, customer success, etc.)
Leaders from each background bring unique skills and attributes to the table. But each one also comes from positions that tend to be siloed, and can instill some views and preconceptions that will become an obstacle to cutting-edge growth innovation.
What does GTM bring to innovation management?
You already possess some of the attributes necessary to manage your organization’s innovation portfolio, but you might not recognize how these strengths can also be leveraged to help transition your organization into the next generation of innovation.
You’re adept at finding and capitalizing on opportunities
As the team on the front line, GTM understands market opportunities better than anyone. They see customer needs and pain points, recognize market gaps, and know they need to drive their enterprise toward developing new products, services, and strategies to capitalize on these opportunities.
For someone with a GTM background, managing an innovation portfolio is about more than ensuring that the invention and production pipeline is operating without major snags. It’s about looking at the competitive landscape and recognizing opportunities to innovate more efficiently and effectively. You’re used to finding new, fast ways to reduce costs and iterate into adjacent markets.
This need to expedite the time it takes to get products and services from concept to marketplace is one of the leading factors pushing companies toward the next stage of innovation evolution. Having your finger on the pulse also means recognizing that margins are too thin to allow innovation to happen in an unclear and unpredictable fashion.
A GTM background can prepare innovation managers to see these corporate and industry pain points, and help them recognize the opportunities available to remedy them. These opportunities are the very things ushering in second-generation innovation, and they include things like:
- Tearing down the silos between FEI, NPD, and GTM that only serve to increase organizational ambiguity and reduce opportunities for cross-pollination during conception, development, and launch.
- Using all the data available at every stage of innovation to refine processes, identify opportunities, and diminish reporting disconnects.
- Ensuring that every decision is being made with enterprise growth objectives in mind.
Reverse engineering outcomes is GTM’s main job
Over time, people in the commercialization sphere of a business develop an innate ability to begin every task with an end in mind, starting with the goal and working their way backward. Unlike FEI who might start with an incredible idea, GTM hones this skill by starting from desired outcomes (like customer acquisition, increased market share, supply chain efficiencies, etc.) and working backward to secure those results. You’re used to examining market trends and successful competitor campaigns and determining the steps required to meet those trends or get the same results in your own markets.
Coming from a GTM background, innovation leaders like you can do the same kind of reverse engineering with growth innovation methodology. This is done by asking strategic, result-oriented questions like:
- How can we remove ambiguities from every stage of innovation?
- What metrics can we use for this project to ensure its success is determined by its intended outcome instead of cookie-cutter KPIs?
- How can we guarantee that each decision made in the innovation pipeline has this enterprise’s long- and short-term objectives in mind?
- What can be done to create greater visibility into these processes to increase ownership between innovation teams at every stage of the process?
You’re already advocating for change
Because GTM has their finger on the market pulse, you’re usually among the loudest voices pushing for change throughout the innovation process. You’re translating sales call data and customer feedback into requests for the new features and functionalities that customers are looking for. And your market analysis influences new product development, ensuring design meets demand and offerings can stand out against competitors.
You understand what makes products and launches successful, and that requires the ability to communicate clearly with other departments and influence change. You need to sell other teams and departments on an ideal outcome and rally them to your side. And this sets you up nicely to advocate for change in the way the enterprise approaches innovation.
In many organizations, the current innovation climate is very insular, with teams siloed by function and often driven by ad-hoc urgency. There are communication struggles as executives attempt to peer into the process and other teams try to speak into various stages. And success seems harder to quantify and replicate for teams farther away from the market end of the pipeline. Growth innovation changes this, and you’re used to driving change.
You understand how to build a case around data and create steps toward a specific end goal. Because GTM is so results-oriented, it’s almost impossible to excel without being able to influence the people around you.
Your organizational influence gives you a leg up
GTM influence isn’t just lateral. In some ways, the team responsible for commercialization often has the ear of executives in a way that FEI and NPD can only wish for. After all, stakeholders view GTM as the ones controlling the profitability levers.
GTM is situated closest to the revenue coming in from new products, which means you’re a lot more fluent in the language executives use when making business decisions. This gives you the opportunity to facilitate remarkable amounts of change. Understanding what executives are looking for will position you to speak to them effectively. Being able to see the end from the beginning prepares you to advocate for change in a way that makes sense to the people in charge.
As an innovation leader with a GTM background, you can be the lynchpin in selling other business leaders on the need to restructure and unify innovation data across the organization. You’re poised to communicate the value of cross-pollination between innovation teams in a way that leads to better and more lucrative outcomes. You can build and present the case for a more growth-oriented, common-sense approach to setting targets and KPIs for projects. The transition to growth innovation requires a specific set of context and savvy—context and savvy that you’ve developed from all your experience at the market end of the pipeline.
Expanding your understanding of upstream innovation
Downstream innovation is a core focus for GTM. All of their market research enables them to refine existing technologies into brand new products or find untapped markets for existing products and technologies. In the pharmaceutical industry, that could look like finding new drug delivery methods like transdermal patches or it might mean creating distribution strategies to get existing medications into developing countries.
But the people working in GTM tend to have very little exposure to upstream innovation, which includes pioneering all-new technologies and products—or finding groundbreaking applications of existing technologies. To lead the next generation of growth innovation, it will be imperative for you to find ways to broaden your understanding of upstream innovation and find ways to integrate that knowledge with GTM processes.
One way you can accomplish this is by creating opportunities for departments to intermingle. For instance, by crafting a rotating GTM liaison that works alongside FEI and NPD during various projects, you create cross-functional bridges between various segments of the innovation pipeline. Silos are dismantled as GTM gets an insiders look at various upstream innovation processes. This cross-pollination goes both ways as GTM brings its market knowledge to bear on the design process, baking marketability into the early stages of development.
This can go the other way, too. By rotating FEI and NPD into sales and marketing, they get a clearer picture of how their day-to-day operations factor into revenue projections and corporate objectives. It also gives the various development teams a chance to speak into downstream innovations.
Understanding the processes involved in upstream innovation
If you want to manage and support upstream innovation effectively, you’ll also need to understand FEI and NPD processes and ways they differ from the processes you’ve used in GTM contexts. The existing silos between these various departments can obscure the differences that exist in research methodologies, risk tolerance, and the way they approach timelines.
FEI tends to focus more on new concepts and technologies. This can make them more comfortable with open-ended research and much higher levels of risk. NPD, on the other hand, is focused on bringing products to market and may have an eye for research with straightforward market applications. They’ll probably be a lot more prudent when it comes to risk.
Upstream innovation is used to much longer timelines with a greater degree of uncertainty than their GTM counterparts. FEI timelines can sometimes span several years, while GTM thinks in shorter, closed loops. And while it’s imperative for someone with a GTM background to develop an understanding of upstream timelines, timelines shouldn’t be fuzzy or lead to unpredictable or meaningless deadlines. Timelines should be specific, measurable, and tied to your growth innovation strategy. The better you understand FEI and NPD timelines, the better you’ll be able to set manageable goals.
This is another area where cross-functional bridge building will lead to more effective communication and collaboration. As upstream and downstream innovators develop more appreciation for what the others do, it becomes easier to recognize how their daily work goes beyond just moving individual projects down the pipeline. They can learn to see the interdependence of projects in the innovation portfolio and how they all scale up to meet specific enterprise objectives and revenue goals.
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 begin:
- 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 GTM).
- Pick up a copy of The Growth Innovation Leadership Manifesto, a piece we wrote to help forward-thinking innovation leaders raise internal demand for new, better ways to manage innovation.
- Check out how Accolade can help you centralize and 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!