Innovation is like an orchestra. Front-end teams compose the first notes, sketching bold ideas and disruptive possibilities. New Product Development (NPD) carries the melody, transforming concepts into tangible products. Go-to-market (GTM) teams bring the grand finale, introducing those products to the world.

But without a conductor, even the best musicians can sound like noise!

Stepping into innovation leadership from an NPD background positions you to pick up the baton. You understand the tempo of production, the cost of every note, and how a single offbeat decision can wreck the entire performance.

In the era of Growth Innovation, your role isn’t just to keep the music playing, it’s to orchestrate harmony across silos, align every section to enterprise growth objectives, and ensure that your innovation “symphony” hits the right notes at the right time.

This blog is your conductor’s score: how to harness your NPD experience to unify the orchestra of enterprise innovation and lead your organization into its next movement.

So grab the baton, your innovation encore is about to bring the house down.

If you’re stepping into innovation leadership from a new product development (NPD) background, you’re going to bring with you distinctive experiences and perspectives that impact how you manage your innovation portfolio. And helping your enterprise transition into the next generation of innovation management will require drawing upon your unique expertise. 

These trends characterize the second generation of innovation enterprise management:

• Realigning innovation activities around enterprise growth objectives
• Reintegrating innovation functions across the enterprise
• Restructuring and unifying current and historical innovation management data

Growth innovation management philosophy revolves around facilitating these changes. And this will require tearing down existing silos between NPD, go-to-market (GTM), and front-end innovation (FEI) functions so you can coordinate with them more productively.

But you’ll need a clear-eyed view of the strengths you’re bringing to the table, as well as recognizing some of the misconceptions that could make it more difficult to lead your organization into the next generation of innovation management. 

The three general tracks to innovation management leadership

While some university business tracks offer an innovation-related focus, those programs aren’t the dominant source of most innovation managers in the enterprise. Typically, people are promoted into innovation leadership from one of three in-house innovation function families:

1. Front-end innovation (engineering, traditional research and development, concept development, market research, etc.) 
2. New product development (manufacturing, industrial design, quality assurance, product management, etc.) 
3. Go-to-market solutions (marketing, sales, business development, customer success, etc.)

Each of these onramps comes with distinct strengths and potential weaknesses. To prepare your enterprise for the next evolutionary step in innovation management, you’ll need to harness those strengths and address some of the ways that your experience may impact your perception of the innovation process. 

Transitioning to the next generation of innovation management

Research and development was the core of many enterprise-level businesses in the golden age of innovation (1945–1980s). Large businesses’ financial futures (and most of the life-changing advances in consumer technology) relied upon genius discoveries coming out of R&D. This gave way to the first generation of innovation (1990s–present), which was marked by a growing need to provide short-term value to shareholders. 

As enterprises became more risk averse, they focused on increasing efficiencies and cutting unnecessary costs. What was traditionally thought of as research and development became broken into minor variations of many of the traditional R&D functions. New product development (NPD) became the face of corporate innovation, but the focus shifted more toward creating new iterations of existing products than facilitating all-new discoveries. 

During this period, innovation seeped into every part of an organization. The perception that R&D was the seat of corporate innovation gave way to the expectation that every department in the organization needed to initiate new ideas, help the organization evolve, and discover new revenue streams. Conversely, the innovation process was fragmented, and teams in every family of innovation functions (FEI, GTM, and NPD) became heavily siloed.

Three principles you’ll need to instill in your organization

Understanding the need to cut the Gordian knot keeping innovation hamstrung, some progressive enterprises have begun reassessing how innovation is accomplished. The three shifts we mentioned at the beginning of this piece (strategic portfolio realignment, cross-functional reintegration, and data unification) manifest when enterprises committing to the three key principles of growth innovation—the Growth Innovation Trifecta:

• Orchestration: Making every decision in the context of a portfolio-level growth strategy.
• Visibility: Centralizing all innovation management data in one place and giving every stakeholder access to the information they need.
• Growth: Articulating measurable growth targets in the innovation strategy, and explicitly connecting every innovation activity to at least one of those targets.

Each of these requires serious reconsideration about how enterprises manage projects, evaluate success, and allocate resources. 

Let’s examine how you can leverage your NPD background to implement these principles in your organization. 

Orchestration: NPD is the hotbed for implementing cross-functional integration

A key step in the transition to growth innovation is getting a comprehensive understanding of every innovation team’s inner workings, and then orchestrating those inner workings in harmony across every project’s life cycle. For the purposes of growth innovation change management, “inner workings” refers to a team’s:

• Capabilities: the things a team can do
• Processes: the ways a team executes those capabilities
• Capacities: how much of their capabilities a team can execute
• Constraints: the factors and dependencies that dictate whether or not a team can execute their processes at capacity

Understanding other teams’ inner workings can have a steep learning curve—but your background in NPD gives you a head start not only in understanding other team’s inner workings, but also helping other teams understand each others’ inner workings.

When people discuss enterprise innovation today, they’re typically talking about NPD. The production aspect of the innovation process is where most of the activities associated with traditional, “old-school” innovation take place. Your background in NPD gives you an excellent vantage point when it comes to enacting change—because you can see where both the innovation pipeline and the innovation portfolio can most readily improve. 

If we imagine the innovation pipeline as a relay race, NPD often operates as the center person on the running team—and they’re often responsible for covering the most perceived distance. They take the baton from FEI, and it’s their job to get it to GTM. The current structure of most enterprise innovation puts NPD right at the center of the action, intimately connected to every area of the process. 

Your NPD perspective gives you an invaluable amount of insight as to how long processes take and how much production costs. If projects make their way through the pipeline (and don’t become zombies), it will be because someone in NPD was thinking systematically. If a new product is brought to market under budget, it will be because someone in NPD accounted for risk and anticipated requests and bottlenecks. NPD lives in the pipeline, and NPD professionals understand it better than anyone else.

This is why NPD is the ideal place to transition your corporate innovation processes—and it’s why many enterprises start there. Understanding of both ends of the pipeline makes it easier for you to tear down siloes and keep everyone speaking the same language and focused on the same strategic objectives. GTM can be highly isolated from upstream needs and concerns, and the front end is so far removed from commercialization that it can be a struggle to share GTM priorities. Your NPD background makes you uniquely suited to understand both groups’ inner workings and speak to both in ways that truly resonate with their goals and concerns.

Visibility: De-siloing the entire operation from NPD out

Part of removing roadblocks and siloes is making mission-critical data available to everyone. A lion’s share of that data already lives in the NPD portion of the pipeline; it makes sense that someone with an NPC background would be particularly adept at making that data illuminating for everyone involved in the innovation process.

If we imagine enterprise innovation as a restaurant, FEI is responsible for coming up with secret sauces and GTM is the front-of-house staff—but the food people eat gets made in the NPD kitchen. However, in the enterprise innovation restaurant, every team is essentially blind to the information other teams live in:

• Only GTM knows that the convention center down the street is releasing guests for lunch at 1pm this afternoon.
• Only FEI knows when the next game-changing recipe is going to drop.
• Only GTM knows about the new all-you-can-eat special launching next Wednesday.

 … and the NPD kitchen only learns this critical information when the requests come in from other teams. But like we discussed earlier, NPD has some of the most important information that the other teams would benefit from knowing, like:

• How long it takes to make certain orders
• How much inventory is in the fridge
• How much today’s fish cost at the market
• What popular dishes are actually the most profitable for the business

This lack of information-sharing between functions is rife with problems. NPD workers aren’t always clear on what they’re being asked to create, timelines become vague, and deadlines become almost meaningless. GTM struggles to launch products on time, and FEI struggles to anticipate what the market truly wants.

The NPD kitchen is at the center of all this, and you know how all this information can help the other teams execute their roles more effectively. There are two ways you can make that information available to other teams: centralizing innovation management data in one system that everyone can access, and giving people hands-on cross-functional visibility to other teams’ operations.

Benefits of centralizing and visualizing innovation management data

NPD is sitting on a gold mine of data that other teams can use to make more reliable plans and more insightful decisions. By making this available to other teams, you give them a clear view of how the whole pipeline works: GTM understands the journey that an idea needs to take in order to become a product, and FEI understands how their research and discovery efforts translate to revenue and savings down the line. 

Plus, your friends back in NPD get access to the vast vast market research currently locked away in GTM: customer surveys, focus groups, trends analysis, etc. NPD teams (and FEI teams) can use this to inform key production decisions themselves, instead of needing to wait for GTM to relay it to them.

Benefits of hands-on cross-functional visibility 

One of the easiest ways to de-silo the various departments involved in the innovation process is by intentionally creating cross-functional roles. This might involve having someone from sales sit in on product reviews with engineers, or having an engineer play the product expert for the marketing team as they craft messaging for a launch.  

This helps fix the “toss it over the wall” problem that happens between FEI, NPD, and GTM teams in enterprises today. The next generation of innovation management relies on making the whole process more cross-functional. By embedding an NPD liaison in the market research phase, GTM doesn’t have to rely on their ability to translate customer needs and concerns to product teams. And GTM will have a better chance of creating common-sense timelines and ending up with a result that makes them look good. 

Initially, it may be challenging to get everyone on board. Someone in marketing might feel like they’re wasting their time observing what goes on FEI, or someone in NPD might feel like GTM is unnecessarily mucking about in their business. But communication improves across every stage by creating opportunities for members of various functions to be embedded in other segments of the innovation pipeline.

The people from marketing who are embedded during the conceptual phase natively understand the product because they were there for the big “ah-ha!” moment that led to its development. And the folks from NPD who have a role on the GTM team will have insights into the development process that might inform how it's marketed to consumers. 

Creating these cross-functional bridges ultimately tightens the feedback loop and creates a shared vocabulary between various innovation stakeholders. 

Growth: Keeping the entire innovation portfolio aligned with corporate objectives

Someone with an NPD background who wants to transition their enterprise toward growth innovation management will need to rethink how they manage their innovation portfolio.

One of the issues being solved by this transition is the hyper-focus on individual projects at the expense of the portfolio. In the previous iteration, it was easy for NPD to concentrate solely on moving individual projects down the pipeline. This made sense because just getting a project to completion was considered a huge win.   

However, as part of the evolution to the next stage of innovation management, individual activities will be closely linked to concrete enterprise growth objectives. This means that a portfolio isn’t just a collection of individual projects to be monitored; each one is interconnected within the portfolio and scaffolds up to specific business objectives and revenue goals. Everyone should recognize how their work supports one or more growth innovation objectives so they can advocate for projects and rationalize priorities based on their relationship to the corporate strategy.

It isn’t just GTM’s job to consider how a specific project is linked to a revenue outcome. Everyone who touches a project from conception to commercialization has ownership in the relationship between this project and the organization's short-term and long-term objectives and its relationship to downstream revenue. 

As innovation leaders, we need to think about our innovation portfolios holistically instead of seeing them as a collection of random projects to monitor. Part of that process requires changing the way every individual in the innovation ecosystem considers their relationship to the projects moving through the pipeline.  

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 drive 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 NPD).

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 evaluating projects and replicating results easier. We’d love to show you how it works—schedule a free consultation today!