It’s easy to take a look in front of you and see what you see without considering ALL the underlying impacts of anything ahead. Like the infamous glacier metaphor, there’s more to any challenge ahead than meets the eye.
Like the infamous glacier metaphor, there’s more to any challenge ahead than meets the eye. But we know that in innovation management there lies an underbelly of complexity and impacts that can transform assumptions and surface level visibility to epic proportions. In order to prepare your organization for true growth innovation, you have to see not just what’s in front of you, but what’s around you in every direction.
If you ask innovation managers to explain the parameters of their innovation portfolios, they’d likely talk about the projects they have in the pipeline, the total budget allocation they’re managing, and the key milestones they need to hit for each project. But there's a sprawl to the scope of the innovation portfolio that often gets missed—especially when they rely on traditional PPM tools.
These tools reinforce the notion that the innovation portfolio is limited to projects directly managed by innovation departments and teams, and that innovation’s boundaries are constrained by resource, time, and budget inputs required to deliver projects on time. But this keeps innovation managers flying blind when it comes to the critical interdependencies and satellite relationships their projects have across multiple business units.
This narrow focus creates a disconnect, which impacts their effectiveness and, ultimately, the bottom line. They’re missing out on the most critical way that innovation contributes to the enterprise: growth. The actual contribution of innovation isn't found in completing a prototype or filing an IP; it’s in the direct contribution to new and existing revenue streams.
The innovation portfolio is broader than innovation projects
Non-innovation projects are critically dependent on innovation portfolio decisions. If the scope of your portfolio only includes the budget spent by the innovation team, you’re probably not thinking about the necessary, expensive non-innovation work required to turn innovation projects into sustainable revenue. You’re also likely missing how the decisions made in the pipeline impact the allocation of time and resources across a host of unrelated initiatives.
The myopia of much innovation management (which is compounded by traditional PPM tools) doesn’t account for all the projects and teams these innovation decisions affect. A “go” decision in an innovation portfolio extends to other teams necessary to this project’s success and signals a resource commitment that directly impacts other opportunities.
Non-innovation outcomes depend on innovation portfolio decisions, but innovation portfolios seldom reflect all the ways their decisions affect the organization. The actual value of innovation’s work is reflected in SPM outcomes because innovation is the first step in revenue creation, and it needs to be seen as a growth function whose reach extends far beyond the innovation pipeline.
Moving innovation’s goalposts from PPM to SPM
The focus of innovation is often limited to “Did we finish the project on time and within budget?” And while these questions are vital for execution, they miss the why of innovation. To truly appreciate the importance of innovation to enterprise growth, it can’t be limited to simply managing a portfolio of projects. Innovation managers need to broaden their scope to include the strategic purpose of the enterprise portfolio.
This shift requires thinking beyond project and process metrics like projects completed, budget adherence, and IPs filed. It also needs to consider project impact. “How did the project contribute to the strategy? Did it hit its OKRs? Did it fill the revenue gaps it was supposed to?”
As innovation becomes focused on results rather than just early-stage activity, it can stop thinking of itself as an organizational service function and begin to see itself as a revenue driver.
Lifting the bell jar of visibility
For this perspective shift to work, innovation portfolios need to be managed by leaders with visibility beyond their immediate projects. Traditional PPM tools can act like a bell jar, keeping innovation teams isolated from the rest of the enterprise, and the isolation reinforced by those tools becomes commonplace for both innovation teams and the broader organization. The whole enterprise becomes accustomed to the idea that innovation is separated from the work of generating profit.
Lifting the bell jar gives innovation leaders a big-picture perspective that includes the context for initiatives and the non-innovation outcomes of innovation decisions. It provides them a seat at the table where decisions are made for various business units.
Solving the black box problem
Lifting the lid that keeps innovation cloistered from the strategic portfolio goes a long way toward solving innovation’s black box problem. The traditional PPM approach isolates innovation from the rest of the enterprise, and the black box problem describes what happens inside that bell jar. Innovation’s internal processes are opaque to the rest of the organization. Money goes into the black box, but leadership can only make guesses about the processes and projected returns.
By focusing more on SPM, innovation managers can become less isolated from the enterprise’s operations and goals, and innovation’s inner workings stop being a source of speculation for the rest of the organization.
But this shift requires more than a simple shift in perspective. It also involves an examination of the tools used to manage innovation.
How traditional PPM tools sequester innovation
This organizational disconnect isn’t just a philosophical or structural problem. It’s reinforced by the tools enterprises use. Traditional project portfolio management tools are designed to manage groups of projects in an isolated environment. They end up treating innovation (and other departments and teams) as a contained unit, completely ignoring the complex web of dependencies across the enterprise. These siloed management tools perpetuate this outdated PPM mindset, working against the visibility necessary for innovation to see itself as an extension of SPM.
The problem is compounded by the highly matrixed nature of most enterprises. While the innovation team uses one set of tools, the other departments they rely on use entirely different project management solutions (or department-specific iterations of the same tools). This fragmentation means that no one has a single, big-picture view of what’s happening or the interdependencies involved. Every team ends up sequestered by the limitations of its own tools, creating a tech wall that blinds them to what's happening beyond their next task.
Accolade was built to fix this problem by providing an integrated platform that breaks down the silos perpetuated by traditional PPM tools, transforming the tech wall into a transparent control tower.
Lifting the lid on innovation growth
When PPM is limited by its own perspective and the tools it uses, a lid is placed on its ability to recognize the impact of its decisions and its contributions to organic revenue. The transition from traditional PPM to SPM is more than an administrative change. It’s a significant shift in perspective that moves leadership away from managing projects and toward managing growth.
What we’re talking about here is the inevitable need for an organizational shift toward growth innovation, an innovation management philosophy that sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome and manages every step of the innovation process accordingly. And it requires that the boundaries of innovation leadership can no longer start and end at development.
By adopting SPM principles and the technology that supports them, innovation’s boundaries expand to include enterprise objectives and strategy. This unified perspective removes innovation from isolation, solves the black box problem, and turns your innovation pipeline into a trustworthy engine for future revenue.
For more information about growth innovation, its impact on PPM, and the tools that support it, download a free copy of The Growth Innovation Leadership Manifesto.