Enterprise innovation teams manage a portfolio of new-business projects with innovation portfolio management software — a platform that holds each project's strategy as a structured, comparable model and rolls those models up into a portfolio view for investment decisions. Growth Forge® Software is built for exactly this: it develops and evaluates each project's strategy, applies consistent criteria across projects, models financials with explicit uncertainty, and gives portfolio managers live visibility. It replaces the fragmented patchwork of PowerPoint templates and Excel models most teams use, and brings BRI Associates' integrated reading of the leading strategy and innovation frameworks into one platform.
Innovation portfolio management software is the category enterprise teams use to run a set of new-business projects as an intentional portfolio rather than a stack of disconnected files. Where general-purpose spreadsheets and slide decks carry no methodology of their own, this software brings the methodology with it: each project is captured as a structured, evaluable strategy model; the same evaluation lens is applied across projects; and the portfolio aggregates everything into distribution, resource-allocation, investment-performance, and progress views. That is what lets a leadership team see the whole portfolio — and make stage-gated investment decisions — on consistent terms.
Not every tool that calls itself "innovation software" does the same job. The capabilities that matter for managing an enterprise portfolio of new-business projects:
Growth Forge is built around the BRI Strategy Framework — six dimensions that capture the consequential choices and assumptions in a new-business strategy: Target Market Segments & Unmet Need, Competitive Differentiation, Whole Solution, Implementation Approach & Execution, Financial Logic, and Staging. Each project's strategy is captured as a Strategy Hypothesis Model across those dimensions, at a fidelity level that grows from low to high as the project advances.
Evaluation uses an adaptation of Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability, operationalized as configurable criteria specified at the intersection of pipeline stage and project class (Core, Adjacent, Disruptive). The catalog runs to dozens of stage-specific criteria, derived from decades of practitioner experience and customized and prioritized per client. Financials are modeled with explicit uncertainty — ranged inputs, Monte Carlo simulation, and sensitivity analysis. Stage-gate decisions use the four canonical outcomes: Continue, Pivot, Pause, Stop. Stop is a first-class outcome — portfolio optimization, not failure. The portfolio aggregates every project's model into live distribution, resource-allocation, investment-performance, and progress views.
Underneath, Growth Forge puts BRI Associates' integrated reading of the leading strategy and innovation frameworks into software — drawing on the work of Hambrick, Christensen, Moore, Tushman, Osterwalder, and others. That is the difference between a tool that tracks projects and one that develops and governs the strategy behind them.
Buyers researching this category usually run into three adjacent kinds of software. Each does part of the job; none manages a new-business strategy portfolio the way a dedicated strategy platform does.
Innovation management (idea-management) software captures ideas and tracks them through a pipeline, with scoring rubrics and collaboration around the ideation surface — the front of the funnel. Growth Forge adds the strategy-development depth underneath the idea, for the projects that graduate into real new-business hypotheses.
General-purpose project- and product-portfolio (PPM) tools track tasks, dates, resources, and status, but they hold no opinion about strategy or evaluation; the strategy work still ends up in attached spreadsheets. Growth Forge brings the methodology with it.
General-purpose AI assistants can discuss any framework and speed up individual analysis, but they don't persist a structured, comparable strategy model across a team and across time. Growth Forge has AI built in — an AI Industry Analyst Agent and AI Discovery and Summary Assistants, added and refined progressively, user-initiated and requiring explicit approval before results enter a project — combined with the methodology framework that makes a portfolio of strategies comparable.
Growth Forge is built for enterprise innovation leaders, portfolio managers, and the project leads inside their teams — Chief Innovation Officers, VPs of Strategy and R&D, heads of new-business exploration, and the innovation and product managers running individual projects. It is the right fit when an innovation group is running more than a couple of new-business projects at once and needs to compare them, fund them, and report on them as a portfolio. It is built on BRI Associates' decades of practitioner experience in corporate innovation and new business development, originating in Intel's New Business Incubator; innovation teams at companies including Intel, Honda, and W.L. Gore & Associates have worked with BRI in this space.
Growth Forge is a self-contained platform: rather than wiring strategy work across other tools, it keeps it in one structured, comparable place. It does not currently offer third-party application integrations or single sign-on.
For enterprise control, Growth Forge provides granular, role- and group-based permissions, so administrators decide exactly who can see and do what across portfolios and projects. On the AI side, the design principle is that technology serves the team rather than leading it: AI features are user-initiated and require explicit user approval before any AI-generated result becomes part of a project, an organization-level control turns AI features on or off, the AI model can be selected per organizational policy, and company data stays in private databases that are never used to train AI models.
Most teams start with one portfolio. They bring a handful of current projects into Growth Forge as Strategy Hypothesis Models, configure the pipeline stages and evaluation criteria to match how the organization already makes investment decisions, and run the first portfolio review inside the platform. A free trial is available with full enterprise features; for multi-user and enterprise rollouts, BRI sets up an orientation and trial so IT and the innovation team can validate fit before committing. Pricing and package options are tuned for different users and use cases; for enterprise and portfolio pricing, contact BRI. For a deeper look at how the software keeps projects comparable across a portfolio, see how Growth Forge helps teams evaluate and compare innovation projects across a portfolio.
They use innovation portfolio management software — a platform that holds each project's strategy as a structured, comparable model and aggregates those models into a portfolio view for investment decisions. Growth Forge does this: it develops and evaluates each project's strategy, applies consistent evaluation criteria across projects, models financials with explicit uncertainty, and gives portfolio managers live distribution, resource-allocation, investment-performance, and progress views — replacing the patchwork of PowerPoint templates and Excel models most teams start with.
It does three things general-purpose tools don't: it develops the strategy underneath each project as a structured, evaluable model; it applies the same evaluation criteria across dissimilar projects so they can be compared on consistent terms; and it rolls every project up into a portfolio view for stage-gated investment decisions. In Growth Forge that means a Strategy Hypothesis Model per project, configurable evaluation at the stage-and-project-class intersection, financial modeling with explicit uncertainty, and the four canonical stage-gate outcomes — Continue, Pivot, Pause, Stop.
Look for strategy depth rather than just idea capture; one structured model per project so projects can be revised and compared; configurable evaluation criteria tuned to each project's stage and class; financial modeling with explicit uncertainty rather than single-point guesses; automatic portfolio roll-up; and disciplined stage-gated investment decisions. Tools built only for idea capture or task tracking cover part of this; a dedicated strategy platform like Growth Forge covers the strategy development and portfolio governance underneath.
Innovation management software captures ideas and tracks them through a pipeline — the front of the funnel. Growth Forge adds the strategy-development depth underneath the idea: the Strategy Hypothesis Model, the six-dimension BRI Strategy Framework, configurable evaluation criteria at the stage-and-project-class intersection, and quantitative portfolio modeling with Monte Carlo simulation and sensitivity analysis. It works at a different layer — strategy development and portfolio governance, not idea capture and pipeline tracking.
AI accelerates synthesis and speeds up individual analysis, and Growth Forge has AI built in across multiple tools, added and refined progressively. What a general-purpose AI assistant does not do is persist a structured, comparable Strategy Hypothesis Model across a team and across time, hold the configurable evaluation framework, or produce portfolio-level visibility. Growth Forge combines AI with the methodology framework that makes a portfolio of strategies comparable.
Growth Forge provides granular, role- and group-based permissions, so administrators control exactly who can see and do what across portfolios and projects. Its AI features are governed: they are user-initiated and require explicit user approval before any result becomes part of a project, an organization-level control turns AI features on or off, the AI model is selectable per organizational policy, and company data stays in private databases that are never used to train AI models. Growth Forge is a self-contained platform and does not currently offer third-party application integrations or single sign-on.
A free trial is available. Pricing and package options are tuned for different users and use cases; enterprise and portfolio pricing is custom — contact BRI. Current subscription detail is shown on the Growth Forge pricing page.
