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Achieving the Right Balance Between
Stretch and Strategic Fit
The first test for any innovation portfolio is
achieving
the right balance between stretch and strategic fit. If you engage in
hyperreactiveness thinking and continually react to the latest market or
technological trend, rather than following a course until there is a
significant reason to change, you’ll fail. The key to avoiding such
short-term thinking is to maintain
strategic alignment and test the assumptions that drive new products and
service decisions as you make these choices.
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Balance between revolutionary and
evolutionary initiatives. First, Silicon Valley companies assess the
overall
balance between
revolutionary and evolutionary projects. The ultimate arbitrator of
portfolio stretch if the innovation leaders’ judgment, experience,
intuition, and luck.
Internally,
corporate leaders
constantly ask, if we executive our portfolio successfully, where will
this position our company a year or two from today?
Externally, Silicon Valley
executives test their portfolios through their network of contacts,
augmented with technical conferences, trade shows, analysts’ reports,
and venture capitalist briefings. The real challenge is learning not
just what others are working on but what level of success they’ve
achieved.
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Monitoring and roadmapping.
Silicon
Valley companies constantly monitor technology developments that are
independent of product and service initiatives. They maintain
roadmaps that define the next
technologies they will pursue and the requisite timing of each.
The companies match these technology roadmaps
to their product roadmaps to ensure that the two are synchronized. By doing
so, they track always at leas two generations of technologies, products, and
services. Technology roadmaps identify technologies and define a migration
path from one to another, as well as within the company. Core technology
developments that take longer are separated from shorter product and service
initiatives.
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