Innovationinitiationinvestment

Corporate management needs to broaden their investment perspectives, leverage emerging trends for exploring business investment opportunities

Every organization is different, every business initiative is unique, every industry is different, investors are also different, there is no one size fits all formula to invest. 

 Investment is both art and science. Great investors advocate entrepreneurship/intrapreneurship activities, strike the right balance of short-term gain and long-term perspective, put emphasis on investing in people-centric initiatives to catalyze innovation and lead transformative changes.

Visibility into each investment is established to provide ongoing reliable investment information via insightful inquiries: All business investments and meaningful business activities should strive to build tangible business capabilities to achieve ultimate business goals. For all critical business investments, generate business cases, look for investments to be justified and governed on the basis of business benefit delivery, return on investment.

It’s also crucial to evaluate the impacts of investment by thoughtful check-up: What outcomes can the sponsor expect to achieve through investment in the proposed initiative? What is the relative health (risk, value, strategic importance) of each of the portfolios? What investments, or even portfolios, should I direct more assets to? What, and where, are there talent gaps? How can I better communicate to and partner with the business to improve the investment portfolio’s value? Which benefits will be achieved through addressing the key business drivers? Can these business benefits be measured and quantified?

Make strategic objective alignment of the investment portfolio: Businesses become more dynamic than ever, there is an element of uncertainty with respect to unknown risks. Organizations are at different stages of the business development cycle. That means the management probably wouldn't know where to invest in new capabilities. Even if the organization thought there was any value justification for making the investment, it’s important to make an objective assessment of the investment portfolio to ensure that all business investments and meaningful business activities should strive to build tangible business capabilities to achieve ultimate business goals.

Make sure the # and financial investment of the projects that are aligned with at least one strategic objective over the total portfolio. In order to accelerate the speed of business change, the bottom line of return on investment (ROI) should be achieved and can be measured if there is a marked improvement in optimizing processes, and managing risks to an acceptable level and grasping growth opportunities to achieve tangible business results.

Do return on investment analysis on innovation initiation: Every organization is different, every innovation initiative is also unique, invest in and leverage appropriate technologies and solutions to generate valuable insights to help their businesses open up new channels of revenue and monetization within the enterprise, their ecosystem, and the industry. Creativity can flow seamlessly and innovation can be managed more effortlessly. However, innovation has a very low success rate. It presents a greater challenge and reward by pioneering the development of new products, services, processes, or business models, etc.

The best point of view is to perceive investment as structural management activities, capable of delivering dynamic organization-wide capabilities. The logical return on investment analysis helps an organization assess if the business innovation with associated technology or other creative perspective is the right investment to be doing in the first place, to ensure the expected return. It’s important for the management to set criteria, define clear goals, clarify what investments they should direct more assets to by solving problems with priority, as well as the financial impact of the proposed state in terms of return on investment.

Corporate management needs to broaden their investment perspectives, leverage emerging trends for exploring business investment opportunities, create synchronization of all functions running seamlessly, drive business value in terms that business stakeholders understand, generate business cases, look for investments to be justified and governed on the basis of benefit delivery in a consistent way.

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