Our Perspectives on New Business Growth, Innovation, & Strategy

Most innovation management software is built for ideation, the part few companies actually struggle with. The harder work comes after the idea, in incubation and scaling, and that is where the options thin out. A look at what the category covers, what it misses, and what to settle before you shortlist anything.

Growth Forge® Software's redesigned Project Home shows a project's position in the innovation pipeline and its progress toward the next investment decision.

Measuring the capability to innovate is a portfolio-and-process discipline across four dimensions: strategic mandate, governance, process, and decision discipline. BRI's Innovation Capability Assessment produces exactly that read.

Freeform AI chat is great at generating and summarizing, but for new business and product strategy its output is hard to compare at a portfolio level, hard to test, and hard to accumulate reliably. The fix isn't AI or a framework, but AI working inside one: a persistent, structured hypothesis model rather than a blank chat window. Growth Forge pairs AI with that structure.

How much to invest in a new idea isn't a fixed budget or a number scaled to the size of the prize. Invest in increments sized to the cost of retiring the next critical uncertainty, weighed against the probability-weighted value it could unlock, and let evidence, not the calendar, release the next increment.

An innovation portfolio is measured as a population against a portfolio objective, not as the sum of its projects: track allocation, balance, survival, and contribution against modeled targets, and rebalance as the evidence moves.

AI hasn't repealed the laws of corporate innovation. The classic failure mechanisms, above all RPP misalignment, still apply to AI-enabled innovation, and the remedies for the classic challenges are the same ones that help AI-driven innovation. AI changes the tools, not the discipline.

Whether a new business idea is worth pursuing isn't a gut call or a five-year business plan. Treat it as a testable strategy hypothesis, read it across desirability, feasibility, and viability, and pursue it if you can name the assumptions that would kill it and cheaply test the most dangerous one.

The right metrics for a specific innovation come from the objective it serves and a read across desirability, feasibility, and viability, scaled to stage and class. The common trap is judging early-stage work by core-business financial yardsticks.

BlackBerry didn't lose on hardware or the keyboard. It had the strongest product position in the industry and never turned it into a platform position, while Apple used product differentiation to expand what a smartphone was for and built the platform on top of it. A case study in mistaking a dominant product for a defensible platform, and in measuring the wrong layer.