The types of portfolio of innovation, development and innovatin project to manage vary between a vertically led (by area of activity, product type etc.) approach or a process one where the portfolios reflect the life cycle of an idea through to maturity.
Vertical Portfolios
Advantages
Disadvantages
More complexity required in allocating resources to the individual topic based portfolios.
Need to recreate aggregated overall views of project and product maturity. In other words, you need to look at the overall set of projects to see the big picture in terms of their maturity, risk, resource usage etc. No one portfolio is sufficiently representative on its own.
Process Focussed Portfolios
Advantages
Easier to apply
Disadvantages
Focus on maturity of projects can take focus off different types of product/feature
Challenge of managing innovation through to industrialisation in one portfolio
© Copyright 2005 Richard A D Jones
