A dive into Portfolio Management with Noel Sobelman | Sopheon

Noel Sobelman is the Principal Innovation Practice Lead at Change Logic, where he works with corporate leadership to accelerate core business vitality and new-growth business. Noel has led venture programs that received national accolades, including USA Today/Rochester Institute of Technology's Quality Cup, PR Week's Best High Tech Consumer Launch, PC Magazine's Editors' Choice, and CNET's Best of CES awards. Over the past 25 years, he was a partner and managing director at Kalypso, segment director at Kyocera Wireless Corporation, and Director of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development at Mobility Electronics. Noel has a Master of Business Administration in Innovation & Technology Management from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business and a Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering from the University of Arizona. Noel joins me today to take a deeper dive into portfolio management. He highlights why companies need to consider manufacturability in innovation and structure teams to understand cross-function dependencies. He reveals how to use a closed-loop process and early mindset to improve quality and the customer experience over the current state product. Noel shares what portfolio management is and how to view it as the link between strategy and execution. He describes the criteria and methodology that helps avoid an overloaded pipeline and late-stage firefighting. Noel also shares how companies handle new growth and develop new business models while maintaining and growing their core business.

"The incentive for the short term translates into taking safe bets, predictable bets, and over time if you do that too much, you're gonna have a very conservative portfolio." - Noel Sobelman

• Why manufacturability needs careful consideration in innovation
• How to structure a team so that it understands the different dependencies across functions, enabling companies to scale the right way
• How to avoid assumptions, innovate, and develop new sources of growth where high uncertainty exists
• The discrepancies many companies have between their investment mix and company ambition, and how to avoid an overly-conservative portfolio
• Today's strategic and operational challenges and how to make better decisions with more objective evaluation criteria
• Allocating investments and determining the different dimensions of your portfolio using strategies such as the growth horizon and co-creating with start-ups

• Book: Collective Disruption: How Corporations & Startups Can Co-Create Transformative New Businesses by Michael Docherty

• Change Logic
• Change Logic on LinkedIn
• Change Logic on Twitter
• Noel Sobelmen on LinkedIn
• Email: noel.sobelman@changelogic.com

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