It's that time of the week again - webinar time! The New Innovation Economy webinar this week features Hector del Castillo from AIPMM and our own Hari Candadai, discussing risk reduction and turning innovation to profit.

As companies begin to look beyond the latest global economic crisis, many are refocusing on growth and innovation has once again become a priority. The approach companies use to generate ideas and turn them into products and services has changed little since before the global economic crisis. In the past few years the core barriers to successful innovation haven’t changed, yet companies have made little progress in surmounting them. Many of the challenges such as finding the right talent, encouraging collaboration and risk taking, and organizing the innovation process from beginning to end are consistent across companies and industries. Many executives understand that innovation is very important, but their companies’ approach to it is often informal, and leaders lack confidence in their decisions.

We've concluded of the 2011 Innovation Management Priorities and Challenges survey we recently conducted with AIPMM and are currently compiling the results. We be sharing the findings, as well as best practices and insights into what leading companies are doing (and their plans) in the coming year at special West Coast (San Francisco Bay Area) and an East Coast (Boston Area) Breakfast Briefings.

The West Coast briefing is being hosted in Fremont, CA at Mentor Graphics on Tuesday 26 October 2010 from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. The East Coast briefing will be hosted at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. in Chelmsford, MA on Wednesday 3 November 2010, also from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. The content is tailored for both executives and practitioners, and will be beneficial for hearing the study results first-hand while learning how they may affect your corporate and product strategy.

Our team here regularly reads the ribbonfarm blog by Venkat and one of his latest posts created quite a stir interesting enough to bring the conversation here.

It’s a long read, but I encourage you take a look before reading on.

If you dig into the comments you'll find that Venkat had a set of experiences in his professional life that made him frustrated with people becoming overly-analytical. He feels surrounded by people using statistics to “avoid thinking” and ultimately deflect blame for failures to the analytical model.

When Venkat says some bring the data driven model to a “holy activity”, that’s no joke and for many his comments are like an assault on their religion. Data is a tool so powerful, it’s no wonder it’s prompted a level of near-religious following. I'll count myself amongst followers in that church.

Getting back to the root point of the post, here's my comments on the issues raised and I'd like to hear what our readers think as well.

As we continue our poll series to understand the priorities and challenges that product executives face, I wanted to share the results from the fourth poll. This poll was focused on portfolio management and the challenges faced. There were again over 200 responses representing a solid cross-section of product management, sales, marketing and development roles across all types of industries and geographies.

The question was: What are your biggest product portfolio management challenges?