Community Forum – How can we strengthen our risk management in early-stage innovation?

A: How can we strengthen our risk management in early-stage innovation?

Please find below the responses to this week’s IRI Community Forum Survey. Thank you to those who took the time to add their input! 

We are committed to enhancing our approach to identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks in early-stage innovation. By early-stage innovation, we are referring to the initial phases of the innovation process where ideas are being generated and explored, but before they reach the full product development and commercialization process. For the purpose of this survey, “risk” is defined as any potential obstacle or uncertainty that could impact the project’s success. This includes technical, financial, market, regulatory, and resource-related risks, etc. 

Responses are below.

Community Responses

Other:

• Enablement Team and/or Steering Team meetings

Other:

• Growth Opportunity research process

Other:

• Combination of these, AND a balanced FEI project portfolio

How are risks assessed when an early-stage project is rapidly pivoting or when the project scope changes (Open-ended response)?

• We identify key project assumptions and then research ways to test those assumptions which help us address key identified risks.

Other:

• Risk adverse (technical) culture limits us / Lack of marketing resources to highlight market risks
• Lack of an Strategic Innovation and FEI process before going to project charters

How are your technical leaders trained in recognizing and managing risks to their projects (Open-ended response)?

• From a technical standpoint, well-trained, but not necessarily from other POVs (e.g. manufacturability, business risk, etc.).
• SOR templates

What are some practical mitigation strategies or processes that you often employ, such as dealing with insufficient resource allocation (Open-ended response)?

• Requiring certain level of market landscape/business support prior to moving into stage gate

What additional support or resources would help your organization improve early-stage risk management? (Open-ended response)

• Understand the right metrics to measure during early stages given there are many uncertainties (financial, technical, etc.)
• Better central support for strategic innovation which aligns BU/mid-managers to greater strategy and key growth opportunity areas, before ideation on innovation/projects in those areas.  Which includes developing a corporate and BU level portfolio of investments on big and small bets, for which assumptions can be tested and validations done before advancing to project charters. Corp investments – not BU funds, are used for bigger riskier (H2,H3) work and BUs invest in H1 .