How To Build A Strong Portfolio Innovation Roadmap

Before even thinking about building a portfolio innovation roadmap, you need to have a very clear picture of your company’s vision and strategic positioning. Strategy is about making choices and your innovation strategy must be embedded within your company’s vision. Your corporate strategic positioning will help you define the type of product innovation(s) you are looking for (and the type of product innovation you are not looking for!).

 For example, if your company is focused on managing commodities, you will most likely look for incremental innovation to defend and optimize your current business model. On the other side, if your company wants to lead consumers with added value products, you will most likely look for more disruptive or even breakthrough innovations to capture new segments or create new segments.

Once you have a clear understanding of your corporate vision and strategy and how product innovation can contribute to your corporate strategy, it’s time to define your innovation playground(s). Basically, you must define where to play and how to win. Each innovation playground should target a specific consumer segment with clear motivations and barriers. If you are trying to gain penetration, you should target new consumers. If your objective is to increase frequency with your current consumers, you should target new moments of consumption. Identifying the potential channels of distribution will also help you keep the focus on the right type of offers. Finally, you should also have a good understanding of your environment; the brands you are competing with, the market threats and opportunities. Ideally, you should try to focus on one or two innovation playgrounds. Trying to target too many innovation playgrounds will usually lead to only scratching the surface of each playground and will most likely result in weak value propositions.

"Once you have a clear understanding of your corporate vision and strategy and how product innovation can contribute to your corporate strategy, it’s time to define your innovation playground(s)"

Now that your innovation playgrounds are defined, it’ time to ideate. There are multiple methodologies to conduct ideation sessions. I personally think ideation sessions should be spread over two to three days. Participant must be fully engaged and free of distractions. Selecting a group of internal participants and carefully selected external experts is usually beneficial. Participants should arrive well prepared. A workbook summarizing the corporate strategy, the innovation playgrounds, consumer’s personas, and relevant market trends is the foundation of the session. During those two to three days, different exercises should be completed to diverge and generate multiple ideas and then converge to a limited number of ideas. After one day, you should have a few ideas that are clear enough to be presented to consumers. I suggest to quickly present those ideas to small groups of consumers to eliminate irrelevant ideas, get new insights to stretch the ideas, or pivot on new ideas. The last day should be used to leverage consumer’s insights and maximize each idea. After the ideation session, you can better assess market potential by submitting your ideas to a large group of consumers through a quantitative study so that you can understand how different, unique, relevant your ideas are and more over if consumers would be willing to try those products or even buy them. Finally, ideas that have a good market potential should be further analyzed to understand your capability to develop and commercialize them.

Here, you go back to your corporate strategy and core competencies. Does your company have the right assets and talents to develop and commercialize those products? If not, would it make sense to try to get those new assets and talents based on your corporate strategic positioning? Depending on the answer, select the ideas that should be kept in your innovation roadmap and define the best timing to launch each of them.