Fantastic online session today with with Tom Grant from Forrester Research. If you ever wanted to learn why organizations are overturning the way they craft and execute on product strategy as a result of changing global dynamics, this was the place to be. We've posted the correct slide from today's webinar, as it is supposed to work before it got munged on upload.

Please join us in welcoming Paula Gray, Anthropologist in residence, AIPMM as she shares her thoughts on recent Product Innovation Portfolio research conducted by AIPMM and Accept.

A recent study conducted by Accept Corporation and the AIPMM (Association of International Product Marketing & Management) found that though industry executives view innovation as a key to success, they aren't happy about how they manage the process. The study found that even though companies may be at the cutting edge of technology, 85% of them are stuck back in the 90's using manual tools like MS Excel and MS Power Point to manage the innovation process. They also note that they struggle making decision about what to keep or toss and reconciling bottom up and top down plans. What's wrong with this picture?

I have not had this much fun in years! We are in the midst of a pivotal shift in how companies manage their product portfolios and a new approach is emerging that finally links rapid top-down executive modeling with detailed bottom-up planning.

The company and product executives I meet with all agree that the old Project Portfolio Management (PPM) approaches are dead. The fact that they are only 10-15 years old show how fast things have changed.

Once, it was enough to be first to market. Now, the innovation game is more complicated with multi-layered products and new go-to-market strategies that require a careful coordination of complex dependencies, compatibilities, and timing. The dynamic nature of these dependencies mean critical portfolio decisions need to be made on-the-fly, when data becomes available; and need to be revisited as conditions change.

In our opinion here at Accept, successful portfolios today require a broader approach that breaks out of the confinement of single departmental silos and instead integrates departmental, product, corporate, and IT portfolios into one unified enterprise portfolio. We believe the innovation portfolio game has changed.

Accept Corporation and AIPMM (Association of International Product Marketing and Management) are conducting a joint study to find out where companies are struggling the most today in their current portfolio planning practices and approaches. I am looking forward to the analysis as I am sure there will be some telling facts.

Join us on December 15 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific for our final webinar of the year (and the last in our New Rules series), Turning Insights into Innovation, featuring Gavin Johnston, Chief Anthropologist of Two West Inc., will provide product teams and developers with a step-by-step guide for turning interesting insights into actionable plans to develop products based on features that customers actually need and will pay for. This webinar will give product managers, marketers and researchers a practical road map to successfully incorporate this innovative approach to help grow their brand.

At the end of last month we finally unveiled the results of the annual innovation priorities and challenges survey dubbed “The Return to Profitability – 2011 Product Innovation Priorities Report” which was conducted in partnership with the Association of International Product Marketing & Management. You can download the complete report for free on our resource page, but we also wanted to share a snapshot of the results and analysis here.

At the highest level, our survey confirms previous estimates that about 50% of all products fail. In our case we found that 50% of respondents had a less than 50% success rate, but we dive deeper into why so many products fail and what product executives are planning to do about it next year. We found four major factors in failing products.

As we continue our poll series to understand the priorities and challenges that product executives face, I wanted to share the results from our latest poll keeping with the Halloween theme: what is the scariest product innovation mishap you’ve experienced?

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.

40% of the respondents believe their scariest innovation mishaps occurred when they let engineers determine the market needs.

My previous post in this series described a method for making data-driven product decisions. But the planning process doesn't stop once those decisions are signed off. In fact, it may be just the beginning. There are a couple of reasons for this:

1. Customer feedback uncovered during the development phase could challenge planners' assumptions
2. Sudden or unexpected changes can occur in the market place, economy or competitive landscape

And so, the fifth and final ingredient in our recipe is: Make the innovation process iterative.