Innovation Portfolio Management: How Can TRIZ Help?

Abstract

Prioritising the right innovation projects is necessary for effective strategic roadmaps and portfolios in a dynamic market with ever-increasing resource constraints. Innovation portfolio management is a process that informs decision-makers to help them focus and prioritise innovation projects to capitalise on their investments. On the other hand, the applicability of TRIZ in management is an ever-growing area proving its systematic and scientific capabilities. This paper builds on the foundation of expanding TRIZ and identifies several opportunities for TRIZ tools in the innovation portfolio management process. The study extracts data from the scientific literature to study innovation portfolio management as a process to find two distinct approaches to innovation portfolio creation: Emergent and deliberate innovation portfolio processes. The study investigates the pros, cons and gaps in these processes to potentially strengthen them with modern TRIZ tools. The research explores and explains which TRIZ tools can enhance the output of innovation portfolio management. This research finds TRIZ tools such as Main parameters of Value analysis, function analysis, S-curve analysis, Trends of evolution, contradiction analysis and quantum economic analysis critically benefit the portfolio process and can provide better innovation portfolio outputs through new unexplored insights.