We’ve all seen it, you ask an AI for a dinner recipe, and it gives you something that looks perfect… until you’re halfway through and realize it skipped steps, combined techniques from three different cuisines, and assumed you had saffron in your spice rack.
That’s what innovation methodology can feel like today. A mix of Stage-Gate, Agile, Lean, stirred together without much context or cohesion. The ingredients are solid. The tools are advanced. But the outcomes? Often messy, disjointed, and misaligned with actual business goals.
Enter growth innovation. It doesn’t reinvent your recipe, it makes sure you’re cooking the right dish for the right people with the right tools. It brings clarity to the process, ties every step to strategic growth, and turns your innovation kitchen into a high-performance operation.
This blog explores how growth innovation upgrades your methodology; bringing order, alignment, and business impact to your innovation pipeline.
Innovation methodology is the discipline of throughput. It involves defining and refining the process of moving innovation projects through the pipeline, from conception to commercialization. A dependable and consistent innovation process is essential for organizations seeking steady growth while maintaining a competitive advantage. Having a systemized technique for getting innovation projects through the pipeline is critical.
For many enterprises, this involves some version of the Stage-Gate model, which breaks down projects into stages, each separated by a gateway. This gate allows for decisions to be made about whether to proceed to the next stage, make revisions, or terminate the project. Most organizations augment this model with elements of other methodologies, such as Agile, Lean, and other home-brewed processes. It’s about creating an enterprise-specific system that works. It establishes the “right” way of doing things, ensuring innovation projects a disciplined and trustworthy system.
Methodology is one of the six essential disciplines that help organizations nurture innovation through the pipeline. These disciplines include prioritization, roadmapping, governance, enablement, and reporting, and every innovation-focused enterprise is doing some version of these disciplines.
We want to explore how growth innovation will drive the evolution of innovation methodology in the future, as well as its impact on the relationship between methodology and other disciplines. However, let’s begin by defining what growth innovation is.
How growth innovation upgrades innovation management methodologies
Growth innovation is an innovation management philosophy that sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome and manages every step of the innovation process accordingly. It accomplishes this by treating the entire innovation portfolio as a single business unit that scales up to create growth.
How growth innovation took shape
Since launching Accolade in 2001, we’ve partnered with several industry leaders at the forefront of innovation. Our consultants began to notice some commonalities between these enterprises: healthier innovation pipelines, quicker market entry for new products, and increased revenue from new offerings.
Curious about how Accolade might be contributing to these results, we initiated a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study to see what we could learn. At the time, we had hoped to identify some best practices to pass on to our users, but we uncovered something more profound.
What we discovered was an innovation management approach that was leading to:
- Enhanced launch pipeline throughput, leading to a significant new product launch every five years.
- A 15% reduction in time to market.
- A 10% decrease in the project management budget.
- A 1% boost in profit margin through product enhancements
Their methodologies hadn’t changed, but everything was operating at a more efficient level. Their ability to better manage what was going into the pipeline and then monitor the projects in production was having a profound impact.
As we examined the study’s findings and coupled them with consultant insights, we distilled it into a management philosophy that replaces the unpredictable black box of innovation with growth innovation, a more reliable engine for generating growth. This philosophy is built on three principles:
Growth:
Enterprise growth objectives and revenue gaps are identified, and all innovation activity targets at least one of these growth objectives and fills revenue gaps. Regular reviews ensure that initiatives and projects are on track to hit these targets.
Visibility:
A centralized platform consolidates all innovation data, past and present, providing comprehensive access for all stakeholders to make the most informed decisions and build meaningful metrics from this data. This ensures that things are running smoothly and allows governance to take effect when necessary.
Orchestration:
All decisions are made within the context of an interdependent innovation portfolio, ensuring that the entire ecosystem works together to meet enterprise objectives. All innovation activities are prioritized on their ability to contribute to these goals and close existing gaps.
The impact that growth innovation has on each discipline is different. Some necessitate a significant material change in the way they’re approached. Others require more of a conceptual shift, and the transformation they experience has more to do with growth innovation’s impact on other disciplines.
Methodology falls into the latter category. Growth innovation doesn’t reinvent or replace Stage-Gate (or any other project-management structure). When enterprises adopt growth innovation, the NPD methodologies often stay the same—they’re just approached differently.
1. Aligning the portfolio around enterprise objectives
Current innovation methodologies are ideal for advancing individual projects through the pipeline; however, this apparatus operates regardless of whether the projects are actually justified. Growth innovation ensures that projects are in process because they’re aligned with the company’s growth objectives.
Similarly, most methodologies are structured to move projects along in isolation from one another. These structures will need to be more attuned to the health of the entire portfolio. If one project is struggling through the pipeline, the system is aware of the interdependencies impacting the rest of the portfolio and adjusts itself accordingly.
2. Reintegrating innovation functions across the enterprise
Growth innovation helps break down the silos between various innovation departments and teams. For methodology going forward, this means that FEI, NPD, and GTM teams (as well as stakeholders across the organization) have access to the most timely and accurate data they need to deliver in their roles and responsibilities. This knowledge sharing encourages more cross-functional collaboration and facilitates the integration of innovation processes into existing workflows.
This reintegration enables cross-functional portfolio reviews and project audits, allowing every stakeholder to ensure that everything is functioning as expected and progressing toward meeting its objectives.
3. Aggregating, unifying, and visualizing innovation management data
Innovation management data is often scattered across various systems that don’t communicate with one another. This means that there is no single source of truth for every project. Growth innovation changes this by consolidating all your historic and current innovation management data into a single platform and making it visible to every stakeholder who needs it.
This gives your organization the power to use the work you’re doing (and the work you’ve done in the past) to keep your innovation portfolio on track to hitting growth objectives. When you can see all the relevant data, you can find new insights, monitor progress, make smarter decisions in real time, and set meaningful KPIs for every project.
The relationship between methodology and the other disciplines
Of the six main disciplines of innovation management, methodology is one of the most well-defined for the enterprise. You have a set process for getting stuff done, and that system can be functional regardless of the management philosophy behind it. And while growth innovation will have an impact on your innovation methodology, many of the biggest material benefits that your innovation methodology receives from growth innovation come from the way it transforms the other disciplines.
Prioritization: Growth innovation empowers enterprises to set priorities and allocate resources based on the initiatives and projects most likely to close revenue gaps and hit targets aligned with growth objectives. This means that the projects that your methodology is pushing through the pipeline are the right ones and most likely to deliver on their potential.
Roadmapping: More accessible historical data leads to more accurate roadmaps. And treating your portfolio as a single business case means that every project is planned, considering all the interdependencies, which translates to fewer surprises and snags rippling through the pipeline.
Governance: The policies that provide the guardrails for your methodology are documented, socialized, and easily accessible. So, when course correction is needed, there’s little question about the next steps. This eliminates uncertainty and minimizes disruptions, allowing projects to maintain momentum.
Enablement: This is the software and systems that you use to facilitate governance, manage your methodology, and hit all the milestones on your roadmap. Growth innovation enablement systems provide real-time insights and feedback on every project in your pipeline, so that all stakeholders, no matter which business function they’re working in, understand what’s critical today, what to be on the lookout for tomorrow, and how to work together to achieve objectives.This means that initiatives that you’re executing methodologies on have the oversight necessary to keep them progressing smoothly and removing all the unnecessary obstacles.
Reporting: Under growth innovation, KPIs are established to track a project’s actual contribution to enterprise objectives. This is a fairly significant shift from the past when organizations tended to focus on metrics that were most easily accessible: metrics that tended to revolve around a project’s place in the pipeline. Growth innovation changes this, allowing portfolio managers to focus on a project’s performance—rather than just its progress.
As we can see, the way work happens within the pipeline may remain largely untouched by growth innovation, but its impact is felt in the way things get into the pipeline, the way they are monitored through the pipeline, and in the guardrails that protect the pipeline’s functions.
Making the pivot toward growth innovation
Growth innovation isn’t about restructuring the NPD process, rewriting Stage-Gate, or reinventing the Agile sprint cycle. Transforming the philosophy driving your innovation management probably won’t drastically change how your pipeline functions. What it will do is make your methodologies function better.
But to get there will require two essential components:
1. Effective change management
A move toward growth innovation likely won’t require much tinkering with your methodology, but it will still require a thoughtful, hands-on transition. Every stakeholder involved in the innovation process will need to rally behind the paradigm shift. They’ll need to understand and buy into a change in perspective and priorities.
This requires an onboarding process that communicates the rationale, goals, and intended benefits. A vision needs to be cast that connects with everyone from innovation team members to executive leadership. This guarantees that everyone understands the impact on the various innovation disciplines and their specific roles.
2. Centralized innovation management software
A powerful IM software solution won’t dramatically change how your methodology operates, but it will have a hugely dramatic impact on its performance. It brings all your governance together, automating critical elements. It offers more visibility into processes. And having a repository of current and historical data ensures that your roadmap is more accurate and trustworthy,
As an enablement tool, an IM management software that pulls all the disparate bits of information together, operating as a hub for innovation management activities, processes, and stakeholders is not only necessary for growth innovation, it’s invaluable.
Keep your methodology humming with growth innovation
You don’t have to change your methodology in order to transform it. Growth innovation clears away much of the dissonance surrounding what you’re trying to accomplish with innovation activities. And it ensures that what makes its way in (and out) of your pipeline is vetted properly and aligned with your organization’s highest goals.
Accolade is the enablement tool that empowers growth innovation, and supercharges your pipeline without dramatically altering it. Accolade automates critical processes to improve pipeline throughput and gives you visibility into how it’s running. The result is that you hit milestones on time, meet launch dates, and reduce your time to market.
Ready to stop serving half-baked innovation? Book a demo of Accolade and finally serve up the results your business is hungry for.