Successfully avoiding revenue growth gaps by selecting breakthrough new product ideas

About this Publication

Overview

This Quick Insight delves into the challenging issue of effective project selection. It provides a particular focus on using rules to select and invest in those product ideas that will allow organizations to achieve sustainable growth. It also highlights the highly successful process now adopted by General Electric for ensuring that essential “breakthrough” ideas are given the attention and resources they need from senior management at the corporate level.

Implications

There are many factors involved in successfully selecting the right project portfolio mix that will achieve sustainable growth. There are also various tools, such as strategic buckets, and strategies that can help companies work through this minefield. In particular this Quick Insight shows how:

• it is possible to effectively balance the overall project portfolio by earmarking resources to ‘strategic buckets’; each of which represents different project types, e.g “new products”, or “platform developments”
• aligning breakthrough projects to customer needs adds value to the business down the line
• senior-level support is crucial if breakthrough projects are to have any chance of being successful.
• the calculation of an organization’s innovation/revenue gap is a major driver for getting commitment and funding for innovation.

Originality

This Quick Insight brings together the theory (in the form of simple revenue gap metrics) and the practice of ensuring that management not only recognizes the importance of innovation, but also allocates sufficient resources for breakthrough projects. It delves into the often unstructured process of project selection and shows how any NPD team can get management buy-in for their “breakthrough” ideas, if the organization introduces simple, structured, rules for project selection.

Structure

• The “Focus on… selecting projects” introduces the general concept of strategic buckets, and also discusses how to ensure that product ideas are connected to customer’s values and unmet needs.
• The core article “Data-assisted idea generation and imagination breakthroughs as a means of achieving sustained organic growth” is based on an interview with Shahira Raineri, imagination breakthrough leader at General Electric. It reports on the process used at GE to define projects as an imagination breakthroughs, and details the attention such projects receive at the corporate level to enable their success.
• A box item, based on a conference presentation by Mark Turrell of Imaginatik, highlights the issue of ‘revenue growth gap’ and the importance of filling the opportunity pipeline to avoid revenue shortfalls.

Table of Content

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Key Insights

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