Portfolio

Sparks to fire up your innovation combustion

This coaching session discusses how to (simply) manage an innovation portfolio.

Starring: Inna (Innovation Leader in a large Pharma corporation) and Wim (coach for Innovation Leaders). [Transcription far below]

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Are you looking for a personal innovation coach?

• Do you want a soundboard, a sparring partner?
• Did you just start an innovation program or want to improve it?
• Do you need practical ideas to stimulate innovation or on how to manage an innovation portfolio?

If yes, I’m ready to help you!

• I believe in KISS: Keeping Innovation Super Simple. High focus on passion, low focus on processes.
• I have coached more than 50 innovation leaders across the globe in Pharma/healthcare.
• I work as independent coach: per hour or as long as you consider valuable at wimvand@outlook.com

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Transcript

Inna:

⁃ Hi Wim, how should I track innovations?

Wim

⁃ You can choose from several tools, ranging from a simple spreadsheet to sophisticated tracking software.

Inna:

⁃ How did you structure the innovations?

Wim:

⁃ As with everything I did on innovation, I kept tracking as lean and practical as possible. When I started in my role, I realized that I would only have enough time to be deeply engaged in a limited number of innovations. I therefor decided to focus on about 10-15 of the most promising initiatives globally.

⁃ As discussed in an earlier blog, I used a straightforward innovation framework. This framework had 3 stages: Ideation, Feasibility, Pilot. Once innovations successfully passed the Pilot stage, they would be scaled globally.

⁃ As we focused our innovation efforts on 3 business areas: access, adherence and engagement, I integrated those 3 areas in my tracker.

Inna:

⁃ How frequently did you update this tracker?

Wim:

⁃ Continuously. This tracker was dynamic: Most innovations in the portfolio progressed from Ideation to Feasibility to Pilot. Sometimes, experiments failed and were removed from the portfolio Regularly, new innovations emerged and were added to the portfolio and then tracked as they went through the process.

⁃ I always had a list of lower priority innovations. Those innovations had the potential to move into the portfolio when priority innovations were scaled or had failed. I did track those “back-up” innovations, but more remotely until they were added to my tracker.

Inna:

⁃ Did this work well?

Wim:

⁃ Yes, very well. Of course, as Innovation got more traction across the corporation, many, many more initiatives were started. Too many to be tracked in detail. As global Innovation Leader, I addressed this by creating “Regional Innovation Leaders”, like one for Europe, Asia, Latin-America etc. Each of those Regional Innovation Leaders managed a similar portfolio with innovations from their region. I then extracted from those Regional portfolios the innovations that had the highest global potential for my global portfolio.

Inna:

⁃ That’s indeed practical and manageable. Works like a funnel!

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