Innovation Portfolio Management: When Projects Drift From Strategy

How often does your innovation portfolio (your budgeted innovation projects) fail to deliver strategic change because it consists of incremental initiatives or serves partisan objectives? Senior leaders often think the problem lies in weak strategy or weak organizational creativity. But, based on feedback from seventy CEOs and CTOs of large organizations, this article shows that something else is going on. The problem is often the result of how innovation portfolios are assembled. The standardized nature of the most widely used innovation portfolio methods leads to portfolio choices that don’t align with the strategy. This study shows how management can take back strategic control.