Innovation Management: There’s an App for That

Ask a corporate innovation team how they develop and evaluate a new business concept, and you will usually hear a version of the same answer. The work lives in a fragmented patchwork of PowerPoint templates and Excel models. A few frameworks borrowed from a book or a workshop. A spreadsheet somebody built two projects ago. A deck format leadership likes.

That patchwork is not just messy. It has consequences.

Depth and rigor vary with whoever happened to run the project. The dimensions that get real attention are the ones the team is most comfortable with. Comparing two projects honestly is close to impossible, because they were not built the same way and the numbers behind them don’t mean the same thing. And the method itself depends on a leadership slide deck, a recurring meeting on the calendar, and the personal discipline of a single leader.

If the leadership is aware and savvy enough to recognize the fragility of their circumstance, they may go looking for software that can help. There are a number of options to choose from, but before even comparing alternatives, they need to understand which part of the work they are actually buying it for.

Three very different innovation disciplines

Charles O’Reilly and Andrew Binns described corporate innovation as three distinct disciplines. Ideation generates candidate businesses. Incubation validates them in the market. Scaling reallocates the assets and capabilities needed to turn a validated venture into something the company actually runs.

Each stage is focused on different objectives and each fails in its own way. Each needs different investment levels, different evidence, different skillsets, different governance, and different tools.

Where the Innovation Software category has concentrated, and why

Most innovation management software is built for the first discipline. Capturing ideas, organizing them, scoring them, routing them, running campaigns to generate more of them. The category serves that work well, and it grew there first for understandable reasons. Ideation is straightforward to execute. It produces simple metrics: submissions, participants, campaigns run. And it is highly visible, which makes it easy to fund.

It also does not, on its own, create sustained or repeatable business impact. Running that discipline hard while the other two go unsupported is what became known as innovation theater, and it is a large part of why corporate innovation has a poor reputation inside a lot of companies.

Meanwhile, very few companies are actually short of ideas or struggle to generate them. The incubation and scaling disciplines are where ideas start to transform into real business value, but innovation management software options are a lot thinner there.

Incubation starts earlier than most think

Incubation is the discipline most often underestimated, and part of the reason is that people imagine it beginning later than it does. Validating a concept in the market is the visible half. The half that comes first is turning the concept into something that can be validated at all.

An idea or concept is typically not yet a strategy. It is usually a direction with several consequential choices still open inside it. Which customer. Which job or need. Which part of the value chain. Which business model. Which implementation approach. Which route to market. Until some of those choices are made, the concept is not one strategy, it is a family of possible strategies, and a family cannot be evaluated. You cannot test it, compare it against other opportunities, or decide what to spend on it next.

Making those choices explicitly, so that what you focus on is a strategy hypothesis somebody can evaluate, debate, and test, is the first real work of incubation.

Why that part is hard

This is where teams often get stuck, not because they are impatient or careless. They get stuck for a few common reasons that have very little to do with effort.

The choices feel premature. Most corporate decision processes are built around a binary outcome: fund it or do not. In that environment, narrowing a concept down to one specific strategy feels like committing the whole thing too early. So teams tend to keep their options open and stay general, which is precisely what makes the concept impossible to evaluate.

The available frameworks are insufficient. The academic strategy framework canvases and models in wide circulation are taught using cases that already worked, which is a sensible way to explain them. But, applying one to a concept that is still forming is a different exercise from the one a backward-looking example demonstrates, and that part is not intuitive or easy for most. So teams do the reasonable thing and follow a reference example, whether or not it is a good comparison to their actual concept.

They do not always add up to a whole. Each framework covers a slice of the problem. Used together they still leave gaps, and they cover what they do cover at uneven depth. Nothing assures you that the dimensions that matter most to this particular venture got the rigor it needed or deserved.

Personal experience decides what gets attention. A team will tend to go deep on the dimensions it already knows. A commercially strong team produces a thorough market case and a thin operating one. A technical team does the reverse. Neither gap is visible from inside the team.

None of that is solved by working harder. It is solved by having the right structure, the right coaching, or the right tools, and most teams only have partial access to one or maybe two of those.

What we hear from clients

From our experience, the problems corporate innovation practitioners describe differ between two groups, Innovation Project Leaders and Innovation Portfolio Managers. These are two different kinds of user with different objectives and different challenges.

Innovation project leaders running the venture

• Unmade choices. A concept usually arrives with several consequential decisions still open inside it, which makes it several possible strategies rather than one.
• Solution first, problem later. Concepts often start from technology, assets or personal interest already at hand, without establishing that a real need exists, at sufficient scale, unserved by a good-enough alternative.
• The wrong map. A new venture’s customers, competitors and partners are rarely the core business’s, and the familiar map gets reused anyway.
• Numbers for something that does not exist yet. Sizing and modeling an opportunity with no history behind it, without manufacturing false precision.
• The forecast becomes a commitment. A projection put on paper gets treated as a revenue promise, which pushes teams toward qualitative arguments, a compelling story, or no projection at all.
• Which assumption first. Deciding what to test, in what order, and where a limited evidence budget goes.
• Internal rejection. An organization’s own resources, processes and priorities can reject a venture before the market ever weighs in.

Portfolio Managers running the pipeline and funding decisions

• Reviews that grade the deck. Stage-gate decisions turn on presentation quality rather than on the evidence behind the case.
• Bets that are nothing alike. Comparing and funding opportunities with different risk profiles, timeframes and evidence standards on common terms.
• Fund size and what it buys. Deciding how much the portfolio should hold, and what return or option value that level of commitment actually produces.
• The handoff that does not happen. A venture is ready and no business unit will take it, because nothing in the core funding model fits its financial profile.

For both

• AI without surrendering judgment. Getting the benefit of AI across this work while the people doing it keep their own agency, control and authorship.

The venture lead’s problems are project-level and they come back on every project. The portfolio lead’s are fewer, but each one can cripple or take down the whole function.

Where Growth Forge sits

Growth Forge® Software is built for incubation. Strategy development depth underneath the idea: a strategy hypothesis you can structure, modify and evaluate rather than a slide you can only present.

Incubation asks for two different kinds of work, and they need different tooling. Defining, modeling and evaluating the strategy is one, and those are handled by Growth Forge Software’s suite of strategy modeling and analysis tools. Planning and running the real-world learning that tests the hypothesis is the other, and those are covered by the purpose-built innovation project management tools, a toolset for prioritizing assumptions, planning and managing evidence gathering, and framing stage-gated investment decisions.

It ships with a default methodology drawn from decades of practitioner experience. That is a starting point rather than a fixed answer: the pipeline stages, the evaluation criteria and the evidence standards are meant to be tuned to a given client’s or portfolio’s own objectives and priorities.

At the portfolio level it supports comparable evaluation across dissimilar projects using dozens of customizable criteria tuned to the stage and the class of the work, and governance driven by evidence readiness rather than the calendar.

Scaling is a different matter. Growth Forge surfaces organizational fit risks early, but scaling a venture into core operations is governance, organizational and people work, which is a consulting discipline rather than a software one.

Large-scale idea crowdsourcing is a different job, well served by the categories built for it.

Where this “There’s an App for that” series goes next

Over the coming weeks we will cover the Innovation Project Leader and Portfolio Manager challenges above one at a time. What each challenge actually is, why it is harder than it looks, and what addresses it. The two lists run separately, so you can follow the one that matches your job.

Some have a clean software tooling answer. Some do not, because the problem is organizational, and those pieces will say so plainly.

Before you shortlist anything

Software institutionalizes, streamlines, and scales. It takes a method and makes it repeatable, visible, and comparable across projects and teams. When there is a method worth scaling, that is very powerful. When there is not, the result is a faster and better instrumented version of the same problem.

Which is why there is a critical question to answer before you compare software options. Is the organizational groundwork in place? The charter for the work, the operating environment around it, and the governance that supports it. Where those are missing, no software will make up the difference. Where they are sound, the right software makes them repeatable, scalable, and turns them into leverage.

Our Innovation Capability Assessment is a good place to start on that question. It gives you a scored read on where your organization’s innovation capability actually stands. Where the assessment turns up gaps in the groundwork, that is consulting work, and it is work we do. Getting it right first is what makes the software worth buying afterward.

BRI Associates helps companies grow by drawing on decades of practitioner experience in corporate innovation and new business development — practitioners, not pundits or academics — through direct consulting, training workshops, and Growth Forge® Software, built for the unique requirements of corporate innovation and growth organizations.