Game. A complete episode or period of “play” ending in a definite result. If innovation is a game, it’s a long campaign and in order to win, it takes modern strategies, technology, and innovative innovation.
In order for today’s innovation to take flight, it requires innovation to push innovation itself forward ironically. Often organizations are stuck with old processes, old systems, and old strategies that simply aren’t sophisticated enough to handle the complexity of innovation in order to get more wins. You need to be able to identify growth opportunities, have visibility across your innovation data to make the right growth decisions, and the ability to orchestrate activity in order to meet enterprise objectives. In other words, you need a new playbook.
Enablement is the systems and structures that support innovation management for the enterprise. It involves creating an environment where innovation disciplines and processes can be implemented effectively.
Think about enablement as the playbook, the research, the workouts, the skilled positions, and the to achieve all these things all rolled into one.
Enablement is one of the six primary disciplines of innovation (which include prioritization, roadmapping, governance, methodology, and reporting), and it plays a significant role, enabling people to practice the other disciplines, and giving them the tools and resources to keep innovation running smoothly.
It's hard to overstate the enormous impact technology has had on enablement, helping to accelerate evolutionary changes to innovation itself. So, while there are many areas we could focus on regarding innovation enablement (including your organization of human resources, team structures, and culture), our primary focus will be on innovation management software and its relationship to growth innovation
But before we focus on the ways enablement is shaping and being shaped by growth innovation, let’s take a moment to define what growth innovation is.
What is growth innovation?
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.
This rests on a foundation of three principles:
Growth:
The entire process begins with identifying your enterprise’s growth objectives: both current revenue targets and the ones the organization needs to hit in the future. Revenue streams naturally decay, and so innovation leaders must identify gaps between the natural course of events and the growth objectives they need to reach. With these targets and gaps in mind, every single innovation project is then explicitly tied to at least one enterprise growth objective.
Visibility:
The oversight necessary to keep projects on course relies on a centralized software platform that consolidates all innovation data, past and present. This ensures that every stakeholder has access to the data necessary for them to make the most informed decisions. This centralized platform also enables the collection of meaningful metrics from this data to ensure things are running smoothly, and allows governance to take effect should problems arise.
Orchestration:
All decisions are made within the context of an interdependent innovation portfolio, so the entire ecosystem is working in tandem to meet enterprise objectives. The projects in the pipeline are all prioritized based on their ability to contribute to these goals and close existing gaps. And since hitting these targets is innovation’s focus, consistent, cross-functional, portfolio-wide reviews ensure that it stays on track.
For a better understanding of these three principles and growth innovation, download our free ebook, The Growth Innovation Trifecta.
How does enablement need to evolve?
Business philosophies in the mid-1980s primarily focused on shareholder value. This need to keep innovation timelines tight, predictable, and quickly profitable focused their attention on new markets, and innovation became centered mainly on creating new iterations and reimagining existing products.
Enablement (limited by the technologies of the day) operated in keeping with these priorities. The tools and resources that helped innovation function were focused on short-term, low-risk revenue, and this resulted in three realities:
- Innovation activities were primarily focused on marching individual projects through the pipeline.
- The teams invested in these activities often worked independently, siloed from one another.
- The innovation data generated by teams was spread across multiple disconnected systems and platforms.
These realities will need to be amended as we move into the next generation of innovation management. Here are the three trends we expect to see driving enablement in the future:
1. Realigning innovation activities around enterprise growth objectives
Enterprises will need to better integrate innovation into their strategy for filling revenue gaps and meeting their business objectives. But that will necessitate a more holistic view of the entire innovation portfolio. It will require recognizing the interdependency of all innovation activities, rather than simply focusing on moving individual projects through each stage of the pipeline.
Centralized, comprehensive data will empower businesses to treat the entire portfolio as a cohesive ecosystem that works together to meet these objectives. Of course, resource allocation and performance measurements will need to continue on a project-by-project basis, but they will also offer insight into the portfolio as a whole.
2. Reintegrating innovation functions across the enterprise
Traditionally, we’re used to seeing innovation activities occurring in siloes with teams and departments disconnected from one another. Separating teams based on role and function makes sense and will still happen, but breaking down some organizational siloes to allow for more cross-functional collaboration will become a necessity.
It will be critical for the most accurate, role-based data to be accessible to the people who need it so that these feedback loops can be created and fostered, and the entire ecosystem can benefit from input from every stakeholder.
3. Restructuring and unifying current and historical IM data
To enable a cohesive, portfolio-wide view of innovation activities that encourages cooperation between teams and departments, data must be consolidated into a single, centralized platform. This will create a cohesive source of truth about innovation operations.
Integrating historical and current data will provide context, allowing innovation decisions to benefit from shared knowledge about past successes and failures. This data will also open the door for more productive metrics and KPIs, enabling reporting to go deeper than offering snapshots of various projects’ positions in the pipeline.
These three trends will create a more holistic, integrated, and data-driven approach to innovation enablement, fostering greater collaboration and leveraging data more coherently so that the entire portfolio can align with and deliver on those organizational goals.
This isn’t just an aspirational pipedream; we’ve seen it work.
The results of growth innovation enablement
We discovered the principles of growth innovation in 2024, when we initiated a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study to investigate how some of our most successful customers have used Accolade to generate predictable growth from innovation. Accolade is an enablement platform—and when it’s used in a growth innovation environment, the results are profound:
- Enhanced launch pipeline throughput, leading to an additional significant new product launch every five years.
- A 15% reduction in time to market.
- A 10% decrease in their project management budgets.
- A 1% boost in profit margin through product enhancements
The growth innovation philosophy transforms enterprise innovation—and the right enablement system brings that philosophy to bear on every activity.
What enablement under growth innovation should look like
Growth innovation is a management framework that requires specific enabling functions to execute. These are some of the particular enablement requirements necessary to execute growth innovation.
1. Visibility
As we said earlier, visibility is one of the three principles driving growth innovation. Among all the IM disciplines, it’s enablement that transforms this abstract value into an operational reality. Your enablement system should ensure every stakeholder has access to the critical information they require to contribute to the innovation process with informed decisions and proactive engagement.
2. Data aggregation and unification
Growth innovation treats the entire portfolio as a single, unified business case. To effectively manage it this way requires a system that collects and aggregates innovation management data from every innovation team, department, and platform. This centralized platform makes all this data available to those who need it in real-time.
3. Strategic clarity
For growth innovation to function effectively, every stakeholder needs to understand the rationale behind their responsibilities and activities. This means that a straight line needs to be drawn between every innovation project and at least one enterprise growth objective. Enablement plays a critical role in articulating how each project relates to those objectives by providing that clarity, along with measurable targets and clearly defined performance indicators.
4. Cross-functionality
If you want your innovation processes to thrive, the entire innovation organization needs to function as a single, cohesive unit. Enablement systems should not only facilitate this cross-functional collaboration but also actively encourage and prompt it.
5. Informed automation at scale
Managing an innovation project portfolio within a large enterprise involves orchestrating a complex web of interdependencies. A single change on any project can have a ripple effect throughout the portfolio. Your enablement systems should be able to recognize the impact of a change, alert relevant managers, and adjust other projects accordingly.
In addition to these five requirements, growth innovation enablement should have a significant impact on the other disciplines.
How growth innovation enablement transforms the other disciplines
Every discipline under growth innovation is changed by its relationship with enablement. These enablement systems and tools transform each idealistic discipline into a functional reality.
Prioritization
Prioritizing initiatives based on their ability to meet growth objectives and close revenue gaps is the bedrock of growth innovation. If you can accurately prioritize projects based on their ability to contribute to growth objectives and close revenue gaps, you’re ahead of the game. Here’s how your enablement system should support the prioritization process.
Enabling criteria-based prioritization
Enablement systems should help managers apply clear-cut criteria for prioritization, ensuring a consistent and on-strategy approach to prioritizing activities.
Providing data for context
Your enablement system should function as a repository for your enterprise’s innovation data, providing the necessary context to make informed prioritization decisions. This gives managers the confidence that projects moved to the front of the queue have the greatest likelihood of meeting growth objectives.
Clarifying project hierarchy
Enablement tools should also offer clarity to everyone about which projects are prioritized and why. This way, managers can make informed troubleshooting decisions and allocate resources effectively across the portfolio.
Roadmapping
Establishing timelines and milestones for each project is a complex job. The challenges range from managing various departmental expectations about outcomes to anticipating potential obstacles. Here’s how enablement should assist the process.
Collaborative creation
Growth innovation requires greater collaboration among all stakeholders involved in the innovation process. The right voices from your FEI, NPD, and GTM teams should be able to provide real-time insights into the planning process. This not only ensures that the roadmaps are more trustworthy, but it also creates buy-in among the people involved.
Accessible roadmaps
Every stakeholder who needs to understand current plans, dependencies, and timelines should have access to the necessary roadmaps. One of the most important services an IM enablement system should offer is to make roadmaps visible to the parties who need them.
Automated adjustments
Every time a decision is made that impacts your roadmap, your IM enablement should trigger an automatic response. For instance, if someone proposes that a launch date needs to be adjusted, your enablement system should automatically flag this for the appropriate manager’s review and approval, enabling them to identify and address problems quickly to prevent delays and cascading issues.
But it shouldn’t stop there. Changes should also trigger adjustments to the other projects in the portfolio. For instance, if a critical manufacturing facility requires unexpected maintenance, the system should automatically adjust the timelines of other projects that rely on that facility. This automation mitigates potential surprises and errors, and also saves hours of manual adjustments.
Governance
Under growth innovation, your enablement system should empower governance by making it available, accessible, and automatic.
Governance incarnate
Ideally, your enablement system should embody your governance. This means that whenever possible, it automatically enforces the guidelines. For instance, if specific approvals are required before a project can progress to the next stage, the system should automatically notify the proper parties for immediate review. This helps make governance proactive rather than reactive, and keeps everyone compliant without the need for constant oversight.
Accessible documentation
A significant challenge for many organizations is that crucial governance documentation is often fragmented and difficult to access. IM enablement under growth innovation consolidates all policies, procedures, guidelines, and compliance requirements into a searchable database. This makes your governance policies one with the machine, integrating them with the same system that facilitates every other innovation activity.
Methodology
Your enablement should adapt to and support the IM methodologies your project managers use, streamlining processes without requiring systemic changes.
Adaptable and configurable
An IM management system should adapt to your organization’s existing workflow. Whether your enterprise relies on Stage-Gate, Agile, Lean, or a homebrewed methodology, you should be able to configure your enablement system to reinforce and enhance it.
Reporting
Reliable reporting is crucial for monitoring innovation processes and making informed adjustments as needed. Enablement should simplify data collection while making it easier to identify metrics that truly matter.
Tracking meaningful KPIs
Innovation managers should be able to define, set, and track KPIs that accurately assess the health of individual projects, as well as the overall health of the innovation portfolio. These metrics should measure legitimate project and portfolio performance, ensuring that everything is on a trajectory to close revenue gaps and meet growth targets.
Role-specific dashboards and analytics
The different roles in innovation require unique data. An enablement system should provide customized dashboards and analytical tools that deliver the information each stakeholder needs. This reduces information overload, ensuring that the correct data is available for timely and informed decision-making.
Documented project records and lessons learned
Collaborative tools should facilitate the maintenance of a comprehensive record of each project throughout its entire development process. This includes a record of the decisions made, challenges encountered, solutions applied, and lessons learned.
The system shouldn’t simply compile this information; it should be able to disseminate it. Lessons learned from both successful and unsuccessful projects should be shared with the relevant stakeholders to foster a culture of continuous improvement.
Filtered views
An enablement system robust enough to document all governance and project information should also be agile enough for people to find the information they need, when they need it. It should offer vigorous filtering capabilities, allowing stakeholders to refine their views of the data specific to their responsibility or current focus.
2 things you’ll need to transition to growth innovation enablement
The next era of innovation is upon us. Organizations interested in adopting growth innovation will need to consider two key factors: how they’ll implement it and how they’ll enable it.
1. Effective inventory management software
Many elements contribute to innovation enablement, but we’ve been focusing here on IM software, the nucleus of growth innovation. Your digital enablement tools shouldn’t be scattered throughout the organization and unable to sync with one another. You need an innovation management software that delivers on every factor we’ve addressed. With an enablement software of this caliber at the center of your innovation efforts, growth innovation nearly facilitates itself.
Pulling all of your innovation data into a centralized system that the right parties can access to prioritize initiatives, plan out timelines, monitor the pipeline, automate governance, and fashion accurate and compelling reports is a must. An effective IM management software should accomplish this.
It was through the use of Accolade by leaders in innovation that we began to recognize the evolution towards growth innovation. And Accolade can do the same for your organization.
2. Effective change management
The first hurdle your organization needs to overcome to create a growth innovation culture is consolidating all innovation data into a single, accessible IM software platform. This will provide everyone with access to the information they need to transform how all the innovation disciplines are practiced.
However, this will require managing significant changes and navigating potential challenges. This starts with ensuring that every stakeholder in an innovation-adjacent role understands the benefits of this paradigm shift and the ways they will be impacted, which help establish buy-in and investment in these shifts.
The entire process will require:
- Clear communication
Individuals and departments will need to grasp the benefits for the organization (and for them), and they’ll also need to understand how their roles will change. - Leadership advocacy
Leaders at every level need to understand how growth innovation aligns with growth objectives and champion its adoption. - Training and skill development
Along with this perspective shift comes new skills and tools. The enablement processes facilitating growth innovation will require some training to get up and running, as well as the shifts in other disciplines.
If you’re looking for a more in-depth look at managing this change, check out our free ebook The Enterprise Leader's Guide to Building a Growth Innovation Culture.
Enablement is the hub of growth innovation
Growth innovation is possible when you have the tools and resources to help facilitate the various disciplines. The right digital enablement should streamline the other disciplines while making them more effective.
The goal of digital enablement is to create a constant cycle of improvement. This continuous cycle, driven by a powerful digital tool, is what makes sustainable growth innovation possible and positions an innovation organization for long-term success.
If you’re interested in getting a more hands-on look at how Accolade can transform innovation for you, book a demo.