Our insights
Third strategic challenge
Opportunity selection that supports the strategy
"The portfolio should be filled with strategy-aligned initiatives that target business areas in a balanced way, and give sufficient options at all relevant time horizons"
Good strategies give organizations long-term direction and guidance. However, over time, organizations are bound to encounter many unexpected situations, and unfortunately, some might lead them astray. But at the same time, strategy execution needs to be flexible enough to incorporate new insights and capture the best emergent opportunities.
One effective way to navigate this challenge is to ensure that emergent opportunities are properly assessed. The innovation portfolio should be carefully curated, filled with initiatives that align with the organization's strategy, provide a balanced coverage of business areas, and offer a variety of options across all relevant time horizons.
Some firms develop criteria lists to evaluate ideas and support decision-making. This is a good first step, but we have found that organizations tend to have too many opportunities and too many relevant parameters to easily reach an agreement about the allocation of innovation resources.
Audax solution is to divide the decisions into several steps, each step combining a few key parameters to generate and visualize actionable conclusions. Collectively, the sequence of steps arms executives with a clear base for deciding what they should scale back, which initiatives to accelerate, and how to best realize each of them.
Prioritization brings order to the innovation portfolio and aligns it with strategy
As clients all have different conditions, different objectives, and different strategies, we always customize both the process steps and the decision criteria.
Separate to optimize
HIGHLIGHT: COMPLEXITY REDUCTION
Good decisions incorporate many factors, but only simple rules are noise-free! The solution: Reframe the complex decision into several smaller and simpler ones.
The input for opportunity prioritization can be a huge number of market, customer, and technology trends, captured from diverse sources and summarized in a set of simple opportunity profiles.
The steps then filter, evaluate, and prioritize the opportunities based on ratings collected from internal and possibly external experts.
Some clients build a digital system for managing the information. This also supports their foresight activities with effective trend management and thereby connects insights about the future with decisions about what to do!
Visualize in a radar view
HOW ARE WE MEETING THE FUTURE?
With a radar view, clients can easily follow key trends and understand their interdependencies. It also shows how the innovation portfolio covers strategic business areas and time horizons by highlighting opportunities targeted by ongoing initiatives.
By clicking on the radar, users can get access to more information, detailed charts, key people to contact, and extended documentation. As it is built as a digital tool, the possibilities for combining and visualizing the data are endless.
