The second phase of the innovation process is the idea selection phase. Not all the creative ideas of employees are valuable for the organization. Some ideas may not be financially feasible, while others fall outside the organization’s competitive scope. The goal of the idea selection phase is to select promising ideas that can be futher developed into a novel product or service.

Organizations can manage the idea selection phase by developing a portfolio of different projects. Portfolio management is a resource allocation problem: assigning a fixed amount of resources—like money and production capacity—to a limited amount of projects. A succesfull portfolio management strategy spreads risks, targets different time horizons, and makes sure that projects are not duplicated.

Guest Lecture by Ekaterina Sabelnikova (Philips)

So how can organizations select and prioritize the right projects? Ekaterina Sabelnikova gave a guest lecture and discussed the prioritization methods that Philips uses to select projects.

Literature

• Kester, L., Griffin, A., Hultink, E. J., & Lauche, K. (2011). Exploring portfolio decision-making processes. Journal of Product Innovation Management. https://doi.org/10/d4dpmt
• Nagji, B., & Tuff, G. (2012). Managing your innovation portfolio. Harvard Business Review, May, 67–74. https://hbr.org/2012/05/managing-your-innovation-portfolio

The Course

This lecture is part of the course Innnovation & Entrepreneurship in Context at the Radboud University Nijmegen. The course is compulsory for students of the Master of Science (MSc) specialization in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The course has three lecturers: Caroline Essers, Yvonne van Rossenberg, and me. I gave five lectures on innovation management:

• Introduction to Innovation Management
• Idea Development and Relational Analytics
• Idea Selection and Portfolio Management
• Idea Implementation and Organizing for Innovation
• Corporate Entrepreneurship