Generate Higher Returns from Your Innovation Investments: 10 of 10

One way to establish market differentiation is through the introduction of innovative new products. Establishing that differentiation is one thing, but maintaining it is quite another. Here we have put together a ten part series on how to generate higher returns from your innovation investments. From our series of highly informational articles, companies will learn: how to treat innovation as a cross-functional business process, how to align innovation execution and business strategy; how to create sustainable innovation; how to train your senior executives to successfully execute innovation initiatives; how to effectively manage process and project management; how to measure performance of your processes; how to ensure broad stakeholder buy-in; how to understand the importance of product roadmaps; how to provide the tools necessary for successful product innovation; and finally, how to ensure that portfolio management coincides with process management. Here is one of the ten practices that leading innovators use to increase the payback from innovation spending: Ensuring that Portfolio Management Coincides with Process Management.nnEnsuring that Portfolio Management Coincides with Process Management A word to the wise for organizations intent on adopting a product portfolio management system that does not also support your innovation process: it won’t work! Effective product portfolio management requires good quality technical and business data that can be gathered and analyzed on a regular basis to support smart innovation investment decisions. Unfortunately, most organizations lack a dependable, systematic way of gathering and accessing the information necessary to make informed judgments about proposed new products. The best way to support effective decision-making is to implement a rigorous innovation process and an automation solution that will make that process easy-to-use. A viable, technology-enabled innovation process blends process and portfolio management capabilities that make data-entry intuitive. With the right system in place, documents, product roadmaps, and other project information needed for gate meetings and other decision-making forums can be completed in minutes. This represents practical value to end-users who, because the system makes their lives easier, are inclined to use it. Adoption rates are higher, and there is a corresponding increase in the quality of data in the system. If everyone in your company is vested in the process, innovation will no longer be a corporate buzz-word. It will be the way you do business. For more information on the top practices that leading innovators use to increase their returns on innovation spending, look for the preceding articles of this ten-part series: Providing the Tools Necessary for Successful Product Innovation, Understanding the Importance of Product Roadmaps, and several other informative articles on generating higher returns from innovation investments.