What are the best practices for managing innovation portfolios and pipelines?

2 Balance your innovation portfolio

Your innovation portfolio is the collection of all your current and potential innovation projects, ranging from incremental improvements to radical breakthroughs, and from short-term experiments to long-term ventures. To manage your innovation portfolio effectively, you need to balance it across different dimensions, such as risk, return, time, resources, and impact. A balanced portfolio will help you optimize your innovation performance, reduce your exposure to uncertainty, and diversify your sources of growth. One useful tool to balance your portfolio is the three horizons framework, which classifies your projects according to their maturity and potential contribution to your future business.

4 Measure your innovation outcomes

To manage your innovation outcomes, you need to define and track the relevant metrics and KPIs that reflect your innovation goals, progress, and impact. Your innovation metrics and KPIs should be aligned with your innovation strategy, portfolio, and pipeline, as well as with your overall business performance indicators. You should also use a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures, as well as leading and lagging indicators, to capture the different aspects and stages of your innovation process. Moreover, you should use your metrics and KPIs to monitor, evaluate, and improve your innovation results, as well as to communicate and celebrate your innovation achievements and learnings.

5 Learn from your innovation experience

Managing innovation portfolios and pipelines is not a one-time activity, but a continuous learning journey that requires constant adaptation and improvement. Therefore, you need to foster a culture of learning and experimentation in your organization, where you can learn from your successes and failures, as well as from your customers, competitors, and partners. You should also leverage the data and insights you collect from your innovation metrics and KPIs, as well as from your innovation teams and stakeholders, to identify and address the gaps and opportunities in your innovation process. Furthermore, you should share and disseminate your innovation learnings and best practices across your organization, as well as with your external innovation ecosystem.

6 Innovate with purpose and passion

Managing innovation portfolios and pipelines is not only a matter of tools and techniques, but also of mindset and attitude. To succeed in innovation, you need to have a clear purpose and a strong passion for creating value and solving problems for your customers and your business. You also need to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity, as well as the challenges and risks that come with innovation. Moreover, you need to collaborate and co-create with your innovation teams and stakeholders, as well as with your customers and partners, to generate and implement the best ideas. Finally, you need to have fun and enjoy the innovation journey, as it is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling experiences in business.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?