Growth. It’s a lifelong process. First it’s physical, mental, and emotional growth. Then begins the lifelong journey of keeping your body, mind, and soul healthy while picking up wisdom along the way. For organizations, it’s no different. Growth is in every company’s DNA. If you don’t grow, you cease to exist. But growth isn’t always JUST about revenue (although that helps). In the innovation space growth can be measured by any number of KPIs.
At Wellspring, we like to think of growth in terms of measurable impacts that open more opportunities at all stages. Not just “growth” as a hollow term for the same old problems, but short-, mid-, and long-term growth. Revenue is obviously a positive growth metric, but not all organizations are just focused on revenue NOW. We have to look at all positive growth metrics so organizations don’t effectively kneecap the innovation portfolio and mortgage their mid- and long-term growth potential.
Since we launched Accolade in 2001, we’ve had the privilege of collaborating with an exceptional roster of enterprises—leaders in their respective industries—who are redefining the standards of innovation.
Our dedicated team of consultants has noticed that these organizations experience significantly improved success: higher pipeline throughput, faster time to market, wider profit margins, and drastically increased revenue from new products.
These enterprises are onto something, and we wanted to see what they were doing differently with our product. So in summer of 2024, we commissioned a Forrester Total Economic Impact study to investigate how these enterprises were implementing Accolade in their approaches to innovation.
We thought we would find some helpful best practices for getting value out of our software. Instead, we uncovered a revolutionary approach to innovation management with surprising results:
- An increase in launch pipeline throughput by one significant new product launch every five years
- Accelerated time to market by 15%
- A 10% reduction in project management budget
- A 1% increase in profit margin from product improvements
We dug through the study findings and compared them with our in-house consultants’ experience. What emerged was a new philosophy of innovation management that transforms an enterprise’s innovation program from an unpredictable black box into a faster, leaner, revenue-generating machine.
We call this approach growth innovation.
Growth innovation: a new approach to innovation management
Growth innovation is an innovation management philosophy that sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome and manages every step of the innovation process accordingly.
This approach is derived from both our Forrester TEI report and learnings from more than two decades of consulting with Accolade customers. In the summer of 2024, we examined enterprises who’ve realized the most significant improvements to pipeline throughput, time to market, and profit margins during their time using Accolade—and drew up a list of commonalities.
We came away from these studies with two sets of findings:
- A list of cultural principles that apply to every innovation function of the enterprise
- A common practical methodology for putting those principles into practice within the organization
When the principles and methodology are applied within the enterprise, growth innovation takes place.
Interestingly enough, we found that companies doing growth innovation use a variety of innovation frameworks and methodologies. We’ve seen LEAN, Stage-Gate, Agile, Scrum, and a host of homebrewed approaches at play in growth innovation organizations. Growth innovation doesn’t require breaking or replacing your existing systems—instead, growth innovation realizes the full business potential of the process methodologies you already use.
The Growth Innovation Trifecta: 3 key cultural principles
Growth innovation starts at the cultural level: it involves every innovation stakeholder buying into three governing principles for how to think about innovation.
At its core, growth innovation assumes that the best way to approach innovation is to treat the entire portfolio as a unified business case. This means every initiative, every project, and every decision are handled as single components of one ecosystem—and every move that’s made accounts for all the other moving pieces.
From a strategic perspective, this should be intuitive. You can’t win a game of chess by only thinking of one piece at a time—you need to make each move with the whole board in mind. Every move you make in a game of chess should contribute to the end goal: preserving your king and checkmating your opponent’s. Likewise, if the goal of innovation is to grow the enterprise’s value over time, then every innovation activity should somehow be connected to that end.
However, enterprise innovation is far more complex than a game of chess. Treating the whole portfolio as a unified business case requires innovation stakeholders to see where all the other moving pieces are, make decisions in alignment with the overall strategy, and agree on what the shared end goal is in the first place.
This kind of innovation management approach requires a cultural shift. Everyone needs to have a shared idea of what they’re working to achieve and how they’re supposed to achieve it. Everyone needs access to the information they need when they need it. And everyone needs a shared understanding of how to do their parts in harmony and alignment.
To do this, growth innovation enterprises apply three basic principles to their entire innovation organizations.
- Growth: Articulate measurable growth targets in the innovation strategy, and explicitly connect every innovation activity to at least one of those targets.
- Visibility: Centralize all innovation management data in one place and give every stakeholder access to the information they need.
- Orchestration: Make every decision in context of a portfolio-level growth strategy.
Each of these principles permeates every innovation function of the business: executive leadership, business stakeholders, front-end innovation teams, and the development pipeline.
At this point, you should be thinking, “Wait—doesn’t everyone agree that these are smart principles to apply? What’s so revolutionary about growth, visibility, and orchestration?”
And you’d be right.
These principles aren’t revolutionary in theory. They’re only revolutionary in radical execution.
It’s not enough to simply pull together the whole crew of innovation managers and agree that organizational growth is the goal of innovation. For the growth principle to truly transform a company, leaders need to document how the innovation strategy scaffolds up to overall business goals. They then need to translate that strategy into specific, measurable targets with defined reporting KPIs. They need to prioritize innovation initiatives based on how they contribute to the whole company’s objectives, and allocate budgets in ways that reflect those priorities. And all of this needs to be documented and socialized so that innovation practitioners can understand how the work they’re doing factors into the portfolio-level business case.
When the principle of growth is thoroughly executed, the CEO can ask any random innovation stakeholder why the task they’re working on at the moment is important, and that person will be able to explain how it directly connects to the company’s growth strategy.
Likewise, it’s not enough to simply say, “We should have a culture of data transparency” and call it a day. In order for an enterprise to truly realize the benefits of data visibility, all your innovation data needs to be accurately documented and integrated in one place. Strategy documentation, project management data, process contingencies, go-to-market performance metrics—everything needs to be logged and organized so that anyone who needs it can find it.
When the principle of visibility is put into practice, everyone can say with confidence, “It’s in the system.”
Orchestration is no different. In order for an enterprise to align all its teams and projects around growth objectives, there needs to be governance in place that keeps the entire innovation machine calibrated. Regular cross-functional reviews take place so that stakeholders can see how the organization is progressing toward goals. Adjustments and pivots are made only after they’ve been checked against the portfolio-level business case. In a well orchestrated enterprise, everyone can work with confidence that the ship is being kept on course.
We’ve addressed these principles in brief here, but if you want to know more, check out The Growth Innovation Trifecta: A New Philosophy of Innovation Management. This guide unpacks each of these principles in detail and describes how they transform every innovation discipline in the enterprise.
Now, let’s look at the other half of growth innovation: the practical methodology.
The “Four A’s” Growth Innovation Methodology Framework
We noticed a pattern among successful growth innovation enterprises: their set growth objectives stay front and center from strategy to execution. After examining the commonalities across these organizations, we could synthesize a distinct innovation lifecycle methodology that flows out of the trifecta of principles discussed above.
1. Articulate strategy to generate growth
Growth innovation enterprises commit to thoroughly documenting their innovation strategies. This involves clearly showing how they derive their innovation strategy from overall company growth objectives, and explicitly spelling out how each innovation initiative contributes to the master strategy.
Next, enterprises formally prioritize innovation initiatives based on how they’re projected to contribute to the portfolio’s growth as a whole. This prioritization is visible to stakeholders at every level of the innovation organization, enabling people to confidently make judgment calls when it comes to handling process bottlenecks and leveraging support teams.
In addition to setting priorities, leaders set specific, measurable targets for each initiative. This includes launch dates, milestones, and reporting KPIs. Thanks to their commitment to data visibility, these targets incorporate historical data, ensuring that they’re both reasonable and reliable.
When the Articulate stage is complete, every innovation initiative has a clearly documented, objectives-backed rationale for existing. Any stakeholder can quickly reference the reason why a given task is in front of them and how it relates to the portfolio-level business case. And because priorities and targets are documented and socialized, everyone has a shared understanding of what success looks like for each project.
2. Allocate resources to prioritize growth
After setting priorities and targets in the Articulate stage, leaders assign resources and budgets to initiatives. Because the organization logs and tracks historical data, leaders can set more reasonable budgets than before—which means the teams working on these projects are more likely to get the resources they need.
This step of the growth innovation methodology also keeps growth at the center of decisions. Resources are allocated to initiatives based on the priorities they inherit from the company’s overall strategy. This ensures that the investment in innovation reflects both the company’s growth priorities and risk appetite.
Advanced growth innovation organizations take this a step further: because everyone can observe data from past adjustments, leaders can more accurately reserve resources for pivots and detours. This allows them to continue orchestrating activities smoothly, even when things don’t go according to the original plan.
3. Align activities to maximize growth
As initiatives move through the front-end innovation and development processes, growth innovation enterprises consistently review each initiative in context of the entire portfolio. Every go/no-go decision is treated as part of the aggregate business case, which means more projects are killed before entering development and fewer projects get stalled in the launch pipeline.
Because the entire innovation culture has adopted orchestration as a principle, FEI and pipeline teams can maneuver bottlenecks and detours more quickly and easily. The FEI portfolio is kept in alignment with strategy: scoping and business case validation efforts are focused on ideas that directly support growth objectives. In the pipeline, higher-priority projects are readily identified (thanks to the Articulate stage), and policies are in place to approve moving them to the front of the queue at bottlenecks.
All of these alignment efforts keep the innovation machine humming along, creating new things on time, on budget, and on strategy.
4. Analyze performance to see what generates growth
Thanks to organization-wide data visibility, leaders can more readily see the ROI of innovation investments, and the best-performing enterprises reinvest in what works.
This part of the methodology directly feeds back into the Articulate stage (and therefore the rest of the cycle). By consistently reviewing innovation performance, leaders can refine their strategies to generate even more growth, audit budgets, and realign activities.
By doing this, growth innovation organizations can continuously improve time to market, profit margin, and overall pipeline throughput. Like we mentioned earlier, the Forrester study we commissioned found that using these principles allows the average enterprise to produce one additional net-new offering within the first five years—all by setting growth as the single most important innovation outcome and managing every step of the innovation process accordingly.
Build a growth innovation culture with Accolade
The principles and methodology of growth innovation have transformed enterprises around the world, but implementing the principles of growth, visibility, and orchestration across an innovation organization is no easy task. It’s impossible to document, aggregate, and track every moving part of your innovation machine manually, and it’s nearly impossible to pull this off across disparate systems.
That’s why growth innovation enterprises use Accolade. It’s innovation management software that houses all your innovation data in one place and integrates with the enterprise systems you already use to keep that data up to date. Global companies use Accolade to tie innovation initiatives to growth targets, make data visible to everyone who needs it, and orchestrate activities with the whole portfolio in mind.
Shifting to growth innovation is a significant undertaking, but doing so will position your whole enterprise to innovate and grow faster than ever before. Accolade can help you do this, and we’d love to show you how.
See how growth innovation can uplevel your innovation organization: schedule an Accolade demo today!
Is your innovation strategy in pole position? Download our ebook to accelerate your innovation strategy and transform your organization into a Growth Innovation Mindset.
