How to de-risk and accelerate the innovation portfolio? Here’s the essence from yesterday’s Lean Scaleup Roundtable.
Every month, we assemble corporate practitioners virtually to discuss, learn and share individual aspects in the context of business building – learn more and sign up (free of charge) for the upcoming ones here.
Yesterday’s Roundtable was about “How to de-risk and accelerate the innovation portfolio?” 35 practitioners from a diverse set of industries signed up, underlining the importance of this aspect.
Here’s the summary:
THREE IDEAS
1. De-risking the innovation portfolio – The “How much de-risking is necessary” and “How to de-risk – strategies and lines of action” depends on the business building appetite. The latter traces back directly to the building block ‘Ambition for the NEW, aligning NEW and NOW’ of the Lean Scaleup framework.
2. Accelerate the innovation portfolio – One powerful lever is the set-up of corporate venture building / innovation scaling. This includes dedicated, full-time teams reporting to one accountable Senior Manager (Amazon calls this ‘single-threaded responsibility), a rigorous focus on a few big bets and the right metrics to measure progress.
3. Accelerate the innovation portfolio – Another powerful lever is to be crystal-clear about the leap(s)-of-faith the teams are taking. The building block ‘Pre-Scaling validation in the corporate context’ of the Lean Scaleup framework shows how this can be achieved.
TWO QUOTES
“If you want to own business building, if you want to build the venture-building muscle, you need to master de-risking and accelerating the portfolio.”
“You need to have a laser focus on the riskiest assumptions on all four validation tracks. Not only because of the commercial and transformational risk. If you kill a project late, this is demoralizing for the team and lessens the appetite for transformational change.”
ONE QUESTION
How effective is your company’s portfolio de-risking and accelerating toolbox?