Strategic alignment is the process of linking innovation strategy with corporate vision, goals, objectives, and strategies.

Innovation Success 360

Innovation Portfolio

Benefits of Strategic Alignment

In an aligned organization, innovation decisions and actions reinforce each other, and decisions tend to stick.

The cost and time required to create a new product or service are so large that lack of a perfectly aligned and executed innovation strategy can be extremely wasteful. You can pursue any opportunity you want, but you cannot afford to pursue every opportunity you want. Strategic alignment, weighted guiding principles, and strategic simulation game INNOBALL create a directional lighthouse that defines the most promising domains to explore.

Growth Business: 10 Traits  ▪  Balanced Organization: 5 Basic Elements

PowerPoint Slides for Teachers

Innovation Success 360

Example: Silicon Valley

In the Silicon Valley, strategic alignment results as much from tacit understandings as explicit ones. "And Valley leaders know that you'll never achieve perfect alignment without squelching creativity and experimentation. Organizational norms and entrepreneurial experience continuously reinforce the opportunism from which new discoveries and alignment can spring," says Christopher Meyer, the author of Relentless Growth... More

To-Do List

● Pick the right set of innovation initiatives for your innovation portfolio and make sure that your organization is aligned and capable of executing these innovation initiatives.

● Ensure that all learning, questioning, inventing, experimenting, intrapreneuring and venturing is done in pursuit of the shared corporate vision and mission.

● Lead a series of senior team “innovation strategy and alignment” sessions as the first step to creating a sustainable culture of innovation.

● Set an inspiring stretch target to unleash strategically aligned creativity and synergistic intellectual teamwork of a project team.

● Provide strategic alignment to establish a jazz-like innovation process: create an inspiring vision and launch a crusade; develop a strategic innovation roadmap to choose and do the right things, and provide a guiding structure... More

Road-Mapping

The goal of the road-mapping is to develop the innovation strategy – to choose and do the right things. The goal of innovation management is to implement this strategy well.

Road-mapping leads to effective project portfolio development and management. It provides for company-wide technological strategy development and technology assessment, as well as division-level project evaluation and strategic aligning. Road-mapping tools provide also a common language for innovation and building bridges between technologists and business managers within your corporation, and with you major suppliers and customers.

Strategic Innovation  >>  7 Dimensions  ▪  Guiding Principles