Innovation

Seventy-three percent of innovation initiatives fail to meet their ROI targets. Yet most organizations continue making portfolio decisions the same way they did a decade ago: gut feel dressed up with PowerPoint slides.

Consumer goods companies face shrinking launch windows and rising complexity. Market trends shift faster than traditional development processes can absorb. Manual processes cannot keep up with the volume of customer data, usage patterns, and consumer trends required for confident decisions.

Imagine a ship setting sail without a clear destination – its crew would waste time, fuel, and effort drifting aimlessly. That’s what poor project prioritization feels like for many teams.

New year, new strategic priorities. Every organization announces them. Then 95% of resources go to business as usual. Strategic alignment remains a management talking point, not an operational steering wheel.

What lies between last year’s ambition and today’s situation? Often, a broken strategy. Not because teams failed to execute, but because leaders failed to choose.

Decades of research on market entry timing show that first-mover companies fail 47 percent of the time and capture just 10 percent average market share. Early followers achieve 28 percent market share with failure rates closer to 8 percent. Speed to market matters, but launch velocity alone predicts disappointment more often than competitive advantage.

Successful projects fuel progress. But, managing the complexities of innovation projects – ideation, development, and implementation – can be overwhelming without the right tools. Leveraging project management capabilities specifically designed for innovation can transform these challenges into opportunities by streamlining workflows and fostering collaboration.

Most companies treat strategic partnerships like collecting trade cards. But reality hits different once customer satisfaction erodes as multiple partners pitch conflicting solutions to the same buyer.

Innovation often requires a multi-disciplinary approach, as many challenges are too complex to be tackled by a single individual or team. By collaborating with others, team members leverage each other’s strengths and collectively develop more effective solutions. Collaboration also enables team members to build off each other’s ideas, leading to more creative and impactful solutions.

In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, the companies that win aren’t necessarily those with the biggest R&D budgets or the most brilliant internal teams – they’re the ones who know when to look beyond their own walls. As a solution to these challenges, more organizations are complementing their internal intelligence with external sources of innovation. This open