Innovation Management Solutions Must Continually Evolve | Sopheon

Innovation isn’t stagnant. There’s no resting on laurels or patting oneself on the back for extended periods. Or, as New England Patriots football coach Bill Belichick succinctly put it, “To live in the past is to die in the present.” That’s how Sopheon approached the development of our innovation management software Accolade 16.0, which launched today.

The best innovators understand that market relevance depends on continuously examining what they do, determining whether their “what” aligns with their “why,” and making appropriate changes. They’re experts at aligning innovation strategy to execution for successful portfolio planning, management and governance—but they need the best tools to do it.

Accolade 16.0 helps operationalize innovation by giving companies visibility across the entire innovation lifecycle and uniting innovation initiatives for greater collaboration and decision-making. The end result? Launching best innovations on time with greater efficiency while reducing the risk of innovation failure. Let’s take a closer look.

A review of Accolade's progress

We know companies don’t write their approach to innovation in stone. They compete in a tech-driven environment where the latest update or market change can force them to pivot immediately.

Over the last two years, we introduced quarterly updates to Accolade, refining it to ensure customers had the features they needed to further simplify innovation. These innovations included:

• New portfolio and scenario planning capabilities
• A detailed financial data model with in-depth, bi-directional integration to Acclaim Projects
• Integrations from Acclaim Ideas and Acclaim Products to Accolade
• Improvements to resource planning
• Updates to the governance and phase gate models
• New reporting features
• Collaboration improvements with Microsoft O365 & Teams
• Continuous improvements to Accolade’s UI/UX

With the release of Accolade 16.0, we’ve kept in mind the growing adoption of the InnovationOps philosophy, which operationalizes innovation by bringing together an organization's people and processes with the innovation jobs to be done. We believe InnovationOps is the way forward for companies to innovate at scale. Accolade 16.0 helps companies embrace InnovationOps through the following new features:

• Deeper Acclaim Projects integration: With this enhancement, organizations can more easily manage actual and planned costs. Expanding on the previous integration, users can now see the percentage of expenses that can be capitalized for better financial management. Users can also see separate health scores for schedules and financials for deeper insights into project health.
• New Integration of Acclaim Products: Acclaim Products customers can now integrate product data into Accolade and benefit from a much broader view of their portfolio health, prioritize tradeoffs and make aggregate decisions on investments.
• Reimagined Portfolio Scenario Planning and Prioritization: Finding and adding any project to the Portfolio Planner is now even simpler. An improved workflow for creating new plans allows users to select from a portfolio hierarchy tree or search for projects to add, even if a hierarchy has yet been configured.
• Improved Collaboration: With this release, there is an easier way to find a connected Microsoft Team’s channel, post messages on project updates and download a document directly to a Teams channel for collaborative editing.
• Enhancements to Time View: You can now filter based on any column, including status, allowing users to filter out “not required “ deliverables and mark deliverables that are in trouble. For consistency, Time View has now been moved to the Models page, enabling you to set dependencies on the model level.
• New User Interface: Accolade 16.0 enhances the look and feel of the Resource Pools interface to simplify resource and scenario planning and improve the user experience when viewing available project resources. This is the first of future enhancements for resource planning that will follow in upcoming Accolade releases.

When Sopheon releases a new revision, we do so with pride, knowing that we’re giving customers the most up-to-date innovation software solution on the market. Still, we remain vigilant about updating our offerings to meet changing needs. We think Coach Belichick would approve.

Want to learn more about Accolade 16.0? Schedule a demo to see it in action.