Innovation Portfolio Management for Small-medium Enterprises

• Published in: Journal of systems science and systems engineering Vol. 29; no. 5; pp. 507 - 524
• Main Authors: Pashley, Daniel, Tryfonas, Theo, Crossley, Andy, Setchell, Chris, Karatzas, Stylianos
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.10.2020; Springer Nature B.V; iMETRUM Ltd., Bristol, UK%Civil Engineering Department, University of Bristol, UK%Civil Engineering Department, University of Patras, Greece
• Subjects: Competitive advantage; Complexity; Decision making; Decisions; Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods; Engineering; Innovations; Intellectual property; Investigations; Market positioning; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Portfolio management; Reproducibility; Small & medium sized enterprises-SME; decision support; Portfolio management; directed research; small-medium enterprise
• ISSN: 1004-3756; 1861-9576
• DOI: 10.1007/s11518-020-5467-z

For small and medium sized enterprises, portfolio management can be a difficult exercise; especially when the available paths forwards are shrouded in mystery. To overcome this, they are required to research and decide upon the path to follow, but this can be difficult when the information to gather is unclear, leading to ad-hoc processes and inconsistency. The motivation for this project originated from a small and medium sized enterprise experiencing this problem of unknown critical information and a technological portfolio with significant potential. With no procedure or method in place, they conducted the research in an ad-hoc way resulting in uncertainty and low repeatability of decisions. To tackle this problem, innovation structuring frameworks were synthesised with appropriate risks and context to pose a new structure for information capture. The resulting structure was tested within the small and medium sized enterprise to investigate the repeatability of the information capture and the subsequent ranking. The proposed structure was also analysed by — process experts for its wider applicability. For the small and medium sized enterprise, this led to a consistent and repeatable method that delivered increased confidence about selecting a path forwards for its portfolio. In addition, it was found to be applicable to external organisations increasing the model’s worth and applicability. The implications of this work have led to a change in the operational procedure of the small and medium sized enterprise to utilise the defined process for researching new ideas for their portfolio which can lead to repeatable and trustworthy decisions. This also has applicability to other similar companies and could lead them through a repeatable process as presented here.