What Innovation Portfolio Management means: a conversation with practitioners
As innovation practices mature across the corporate world, companies no longer look for the magic (innovation) bullets. Instead, they are building strong innovation portfolios to test ideas, validate solutions, and make the right investments to tackle a strategic opportunity or find a new competitive niche.
In our experience, companies often find this a complex process, managed through spreadsheets, ad hoc coffee conversations, and even biased by individual preferences. To deep dive into some of these challenges, we investigated how innovation leaders currently tracked and measured the effectiveness of all their initiatives, and what they found most important. We spoke to more than 20 innovation professionals from different sectors, including telco, technology, professional services, energy, and non-profit organisations.
Our conversations revealed key requirements around innovation portfolios: seeing the big picture clearly, showcasing success, and involving everyone in the process. Let us unravel each one of those in the next lines.
You need to get your head out of the weeds: the portfolio is here to help
We have seen many cases of ineffective project management: the complex Gantt charts, the different versions of the same sheet flying around, the pain. Many of our respondents described this situation when dealing with portfolio management as well. The tools they had at their disposal were more focused on managing individual projects, which often made it hard to get the head out of the weeds and look at a portfolio as a whole.
“To me portfolio management is managing the vision, the roadmap, the strategy, as otherwise you’re a more technical product manager.”
- Department Lead (Professional Services firm)
As an innovation manager, you should rely on your portfolio to understand overall trends, insights and performance of all investments you’ve made, as well as the teams that take them forward. The portfolio would be the place to align how individual projects fit into the overall long-term objective you have, and how to balance and rebalance your efforts accordingly.
Cut through the corporate noise with a clear portfolio summary
In a world where you need to cut through the noise, having a clear, concise and beautifully visualised portfolio is key to engaging stakeholders at all levels. As our respondents have found out, a focus on gathering as much data as possible when setting up the portfolio can be distracting. Instead, clear and simple data insights combined with case studies can be more helpful in showcasing success, driving recognition, and getting buy-in.
“When it comes to portfolio management, I currently have one place for status updates and blockers, and one for higher level directors that would cover revenues and progress towards goals.”
- Head of Innovation (blue chip Telco)
Innovation is about the open exchange of ideas, skills and perspectives. As an innovation manager, the portfolio can be your way of giving visibility across or even beyond the organisation, making it an interactive platform for people to contribute, engage, and understand more about innovation.
You need everyone in the team to pull their weight to make innovation portfolios a success
The leaders we interviewed recognised that the portfolio was a shared responsibility. While they saw their role as analysing the big picture and looking for trends, they recognised other team members would be responsible for inputting the required data and sharing project information.
“I would want a portfolio completely open so people can see it internally and externally. When people or corporates want to partner, they can go in and find an innovation in progress/ a problem identified that they can support.”
- Innovation Director (International Charity)
In practice, this means giving all these stakeholders a smooth way to integrate the portfolio into their current “ways of working”. The portfolio should capture key communication around the project, a place where you want your work to be seen and where you’re missing out if not contributing/checking in regularly. It can also allow teams and individuals to apply for investment, support, or other resources, assuring its role as a collaborative tool across organisational hierarchies.
Summary
Across industries, innovation leaders hustle to face fast-moving technology and mindsets, and explore different ways to make their organisations more resilient in the long-term. Their innovation portfolios will be all the more important in structuring innovation strategy as well as day-to-day operations.
In building powerful tools to support this process, we believe sharing insights and best practice is key. We are very grateful to all the practitioners who shared their views with us and joined the conversation.
