In another post, I put up the graphic above as an approach to assessing different projects within a porfolio and understanding the overall ‘balance’.  The projects here represent a company that is sticking pretty close to home in terms of what it does but is expending significant money in trying to develop technology led approaches to their market (the diameter of the circle represents the money committed to the project).

A few people asked about other ways of representing the projects so I wanted to show the following.

On the left is a way of viewing projects that was first introduced by Arthur D. Little – a company that have shown considerable leadership in this area.  Their categorisation of different technologies within a market is very interesting and illuminating.

Enabling - fundamental technologies that allow you to do what you do. So a steel company needs to be competent in creating, forming and handling steel.

Differentiating - technologies that allow the company to differentiate it's products. This may be CAD systems reducing development time and costs through to the nifty interface on your i-Pod.

Pacing - newer and stronger technologies for the company.

Emerging - these are technologies that are not widely available but are emerging or have just become cost effective for the particular application

As always (well nearly always) there are no right answers that fit everyone.  The right mix for a company will depend on the needs dictated by the overall and technology strategies.  However, it we look at the two graphics above, we can see:

• that the company is spending significant money on one ‘emerging’ technology.  Furthermore, the graphic on the right shows that this technology will not be ready until more than 5 years from now.  From the outside it looks like a significant gamble and that maybe they are putting all their eggs in one basket. 
• that there are no projects targetting differentiation due until 5 years from now.  Again that looks like a long time to hope your current product/service offerings survive in the market.

The following graphics show the portfolio of projects ‘re-balanced’.

Better?  Worse?  Only the exact circumstances of the company would let you know if they are right or wrong and I made these graphs up so even I don’t know the truth!