The power of prioritization is a strong move and those that have mastered working big to small have a hidden superpower.The new era of innovation won’t be won by the teams with the most ideas, it’ll be won by the teams that prioritize the smartest.
Right now, the entire playbook for deciding “what comes first” is being rewritten. The factors that once guided portfolio decisions are shifting, new growth pressures are emerging, and enterprises are rethinking how innovation actually drives results. The organizations that adapt first won’t just innovate better, they’ll grow faster, compete harder, and reshape their industries.
And that shift lands squarely on the shoulders of one core discipline: prioritization.
You don’t have the time or resources to tackle every project and initiative in your innovation portfolio simultaneously, so they need to be prioritized. And the criteria you use to order them can comprise any number of critical considerations and factors.
By prioritizing innovation activities, you ensure that budgeted resources are allocated to reflect your portfolio’s ideal hierarchy and that projects are tackled in an order that demonstrates their significance and contribution to enterprise strategies and objectives.
Prioritization is one of six key disciplines in innovation management (which also includes roadmapping, governance, enablement, methodology, and reporting). All enterprise-level inventory management requires these disciplines in some form, and managing a portfolio without them would be nearly impossible.
Growth innovation is the next stage in the evolution of inventory management, and it will profoundly impact prioritization. So, let’s take a brief look at growth innovation and then explore its impact on one of inventory management’s most critical disciplines: prioritization.
What is growth innovation?
Growth innovation is an approach to innovation management, prioritizing growth as the most significant outcome. This driving philosophy impacts everything from ideation to product launch, and every innovation activity is then planned and executed with that end in mind.
For this to work, the innovation portfolio needs to be seen as a single ecosystem rather than a series of disparate projects and initiatives. This allows you to consider every innovation-adjacent decision’s impact on this interdependent system.
This can only happen with the application of three basic principles:
- Growth
The cornerstone of growth innovation is the establishment of clear and quantifiable growth objectives within the overarching innovation strategy. Then, every innovation activity can be directly linked to at least one of these predefined growth targets.
- Visibility
Growth innovation at scale requires centralizing all critical innovation management data into a unified platform or system. This platform should provide all relevant stakeholders seamless access to the information they need to excel in their role.
- Orchestration
Individual innovation initiatives should not be viewed in isolation in a growth-oriented innovation environment. Instead, every innovation decision should be made within the broader context of your portfolio-level growth strategy.
Reinforcing the principles of growth innovation
In the summer of 2024, Wellspring commissioned a study by Forrester Consulting to examine how customers have transformed their approaches to innovation after using Accolade, our strategic innovation portfolio management and orchestration tool.
The study aimed to find helpful best practices we could share with users. What we ended up discovering was an innovation management approach that demonstrated:
- An increase in launch pipeline throughput by one significant new product launch every five years
- Accelerated time to market by 15%
- A 10% reduction in project management budget
- A 1% increase in profit margin from product improvements
These results were the byproduct of embracing the three basic principles of growth innovation, not just in theory, but in radical execution. You’ll get the picture as we unpack how they impact a seemingly obvious discipline like prioritization.
Learn more by downloading the Forrester study!
The evolution of prioritization through generations of innovation
As a discipline, prioritization evolves when the criteria for ordering projects and initiatives change. It’s the framework that’s morphing, not just the act of prioritizing itself. To better understand how prioritization evolves, it’s helpful to consider how setting innovation priorities has changed historically.
Prioritization during innovation’s first generation
From the mid-40s through the early 1980s, large corporations with strong internal resources drove the golden age of innovation. Heavy research and development investments were crucial to avoid falling behind competitors. R&D departments enjoyed a lot of autonomy and independence to focus on industry-disrupting breakthroughs, leading to intense creativity and discovery.
During this period, R&D was calling most of the shots. Prioritization revolved around the opportunities they could justify and secure funding to pursue, not to mention any areas where competitors may be getting the jump on them. R&D set much of the agenda, and everyone else’s job was to commercialize what innovation produced.
A significant shift in innovation’s second generation
As Friedman’s shareholder theory became the driving business philosophy in the 80s, corporations became reticent to take massive, costly risks with the hope of a significant payout. The need to return a profit for shareholders meant that incremental growth became preferable to gambling on speculative innovation. The new focus became hitting numbers in the next quarter.
This meant that R&D needed to present stronger business cases to prioritize new possibilities in order to get project funding. And corporations leaned harder on innovation to update products and technologies already in their catalog to aid expansion into new markets, or to re-commercialize to current markets.
Innovation managers juggled portfolios brimming with projects and initiatives during this period (which is ongoing). Most of those initiatives were orders to innovate existing products and revenue streams. And prioritization involved juggling an often dizzying number of conflicting factors and interests.
How innovation needs to evolve for this third generation
This third generation of innovation will require a more strategic alignment between enterprise objectives and the innovation activities. This will create a tighter loop between the organizational goals and innovation processes. Instead of seeing innovation as a function of the business, it will become (once again) an integral part of the company’s DNA.
We’ll see a shift from meeting short-term stockholder demands to a more holistic, scaled approach, where decisions are rooted in long-term enterprise objectives. And while there are still a myriad of factors to consider in prioritization, the guiding, overarching consideration will be closing revenue gaps.
Let’s look more closely at the ways prioritization needs to evolve in this new generation.
How growth innovation transforms prioritization
Growth innovation reshapes how prioritization functions in innovation management. Instead of siloed processes where prioritization can become somewhat subjective, growth innovation embraces a more data-driven approach that emphasizes alignment with organizational goals and objectives.
In the second generation, innovation was managed across multiple teams on various platforms. Reviews were compiled from multiple spreadsheets from various departments, individual reports, and anecdotal information. Under growth management, all this information is consolidated into a single comprehensive system. This ensures that data is up-to-date and accessible to everyone who needs it, giving everyone the information and context necessary to hit rank projects in the order they need to be tackled.
Aggregating all this current and historical data into a single platform allows priorities to be set in light of the entire portfolio. It also allows you to understand better why certain types of projects consistently underperformed in the past, which can inform decisions about similar initiatives in the present.
The cornerstone of growth innovation is the correlation between innovation initiatives and the organization’s objectives. This prevents the prioritization of pet projects or initiatives without any legitimate rationale. Projects are greenlit and prioritized based on their ability to close revenue gaps and move the organization toward its growth objectives.
Understanding the prioritization-reporting diad
The six disciplines of innovation fall into two categories: the strategic disciplines (prioritization, road mapping, and governance) and the operational disciplines (reporting, methodology, and enablement).
Growth innovation syncs each of the strategic disciplines to its coordinating operational discipline:
- Prioritization → Reporting
- Roadmapping → Methodology
- Governance → Enablement
The business landscape is seldom static. Markets shift, competitive landscapes change, and opportunities arise. Projects in development can also hit obstacles or wander from their original intent. By syncing reporting and prioritization, you never have to hope projects are on track or running according to schedule. You clearly understand the rationale behind prioritizing a project and get to watch its progression toward those goals.
Traditionally, prioritizing innovation required a lot of educated guesswork. Growth innovation addresses this by emphasizing the critical link between prioritized initiatives and their performance against relevant metrics. By adopting growth innovation, the rationale behind prioritizing each project and initiative is directly linked to specific KPIs demonstrating its performance in real time. And when there’s a developmental hurdle or a shift in focus, you can shift priorities or address issues to get back on track.
The alignment of prioritization and reporting creates many significant advantages:
- Enhanced decision making
When clear metrics are associated with your priorities, you ensure that your justifications for prioritizing projects continue to make sense throughout development. You can demonstrate that projects are aligned to hit their targets. You’re also creating a data repository to draw from when prioritizing future tasks.
- Improved Accountability
Syncing prioritization and reporting makes it easier to identify where responsibility for hitting milestones and targets lies throughout the innovation pipeline. When something falls through the cracks, you know where and why. - Agile resource allocation
Monitoring the projects in your portfolio against their rationale for existing allows you to make necessary changes on the fly. If shifting priorities makes sense or resources need to be adjusted to navigate hurdles, you can move quickly and confidently. - Clearer communication
By aligning prioritization and reporting, you can consistently demonstrate to stakeholders how innovation activities align with the organization’s strategic objectives. - Vigilant project monitoring
The priorities you rely on to order the activities in your portfolio become immaterial without the means to monitor their progress. A reliable reporting mechanism ensures that projects stay on track to hit their milestones and targets, saving you from missed deadlines and the inevitable zombie projects.
How the prioritization-reporting diad impacts other disciplines
Each disciplinary diad impacts the other innovation disciplines, supporting the entire innovation ecosystem. Here are some ways that this diad impacts the other disciplines.
Roadmapping
Your growth-oriented priorities can help focus the work of creating timelines. This is critical because you’re not simply mapping out a series of independent projects but creating a complex timeline of interdependent activities across your entire portfolio. Sequencing everything properly and juggling contingencies is much easier when measuring everything against the same prioritization standards.
You don’t have to get stuck with a static roadmap that becomes useless once a project starts missing deadlines or milestones. The reporting element of this diad ensures that your timeline stays aligned with these priorities because you can reroute your map when necessary.
Governance
Your governance may have material triggers that call for intervention when projects go awry. Still, without a clear prioritization rationale and the visibility necessary to trip those triggers, it doesn’t matter. Reporting helps you hear that alarm ring, and having the project's justification and the KPIs mapping its progress gives you the objective justification for taking required actions.
A clear rationale for prioritizing projects and the metrics necessary to monitor their progress empowers you to intervene and adjust as needed. You may have a strong justification for launching a project, but the reporting element of the diad lets you mediate if it starts to drift too far from its intended target.
Enablement
The reporting portion of the prioritization/reporting diad comes from your enablement tools and resources. But when priorities and KPIs are in sync, it feeds back into your enablement infrastructure, allowing everything to run more reliably.
Your enablement system is designed to facilitate all the processes necessary for projects to progress successfully through development. The prioritization/reporting diad equips you to monitor that progression and ensure that it’s aligned with the rationale that got it prioritized in the first place. This creates a unified, cohesive, and healthy facilitation and feedback loop.
Methodology
Your innovation framework and processes are the pipeline. When a problem occurs, the project isn’t always the reason. Occasionally, there can be a breakdown somewhere in the methodology. But we can be so focused on the project that we miss the problems in our processes. Having clear priorities and KPIs helps you identify issues and makes it easier to discern the root cause. When you have to step in and adjust your operational procedures, you have an objective rationale for doing so.
The value of the prioritization-reporting diad isn’t just that it highlights underperforming areas, but it also identifies projects that exceed expectations. By analyzing the processes and practices used in the projects that exceed expectations, you study and discern what made them work and adopt that methodology in other activities.
The two elements that make this transition possible
For the transition to growth innovation to be successful, an organization requires two essential elements:
1. Effective change management
Simply announcing a change in innovation management philosophy and implementing new processes and technologies won’t make growth innovation successful. The transition must be managed efficiently to ensure stakeholder buy-in and engagement at every level.
This means communicating growth innovation's rationale, goals, and potential benefits. Everyone from executive leadership to innovation team members must grasp the vision for this shift, guaranteeing that everyone is aligned with any necessary changes and understands their role in making the transition successful.
For the areas requiring new competencies, training and development will empower everyone to adapt to new technologies, principles, processes, and roles.
2. Centralized innovation management software
Too often, innovation is managed across multiple software platforms that don’t necessarily speak to one another. Growth innovation requires a software solution that works as a repository for current and historical data, facilitates role-based workflows and access to information, and contains built-in governance tools.
At the center of growth innovation, robust IM software operates as a hub between every innovation activity, process, and stakeholder.
Growth innovation transforms prioritization
Productive innovation management hinges on prioritization. The process deteriorates if the framework we use to support prioritization is overly complex, relying on too many equally weighted factors. Growth innovation helps crystallize prioritization by making enterprise growth the most critical prioritization factor.
Growth innovation transforms prioritization and, in the process, enhances all the other disciplines associated with innovation. You can download our free ebook, “The Growth Innovation Trifecta,” to better understand the principles undergirding growth innovation.
Book a demo of Accolade and discover how the right IM software can transform how you manage your entire portfolio.