ابتکار فن آوری برای نوآوری محصول: رویکرد مدیریت پروژه

The optimal allocation of resources at the firm level to transform emergent technological invention into commercially successful products depends on the effective assessment and selection of projects. This study develops a multidisciplinary model for differentiating, prioritizing, and selecting investment in technological projects within an organization’s portfolio. Approaches from project portfolio and strategic technology management are integrated to explore how a particular product within a diverse project portfolio may be prioritized and developed. Our results suggest that the application of the suggested model to a portfolio of biotechnology projects may enhance the assessment of internal capabilities and external competitiveness, thereby providing a basis for firms to prioritize and preferentially allocate scarce resources within a portfolio of heterogeneous technologies.

Firm growth and sustainability depend in part on the effective allocation of resources and risk management at the organizational level. Tools for effectively assessing organizational projects in order to select those that contribute to organizational goals therefore becomes important (Peerasit and Milosevic, 2009), especially in the context of limited resources (Rad and Levin, 2006), nascent technologies seeking legitimacy (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994), and frequent project failure (e.g., Johnson et al., 2001, Kutsch and Hall, 2005, Luna-Reyes et al., 2005 and Leach, 2005). To explore this dynamic process, we develop and apply a model for differentiating, prioritizing, and selecting projects within an organization’s portfolio. The merit of refining project portfolio tools is based on their potential to improve the product innovation process by ensuring that scarce organizational resources are spent on projects that are based not only on advanced innovation, but also have a reasonable probability of turning into successful products (Peerasit and Milosevic, 2009). This exploratory study integrates portfolio management and technology management approaches by extending the Diamond Model of project management (Dvir et al., 2006 and Shenhar and Dvir, 2007) through integrating it with strategic technology management criteria (e.g., Porter, 1985, Porter, 1991, Curry and Brown, 2003 and Manion and Cherion, 2009). The empirical context for this investigation is a research and development-based organization and its portfolio of diverse, nascent biotechnology product candidates aimed at a single wound healing application. Specifically, Industrial Research Limited (IRL), a New Zealand Crown Research Institute (CRI), has a portfolio of five wound healing products based on heterogeneous, nascent technologies was the focus of analysis and a mixed-methods research design. The question this paper poses is: How are nascent high technology products within an organizational portfolio differentiated, selected and prioritized among competing projects under conditions of uncertainty? From a theoretical standpoint, we develop an extension of technology management tools through the integration of portfolio and strategic project management insights. From a practical standpoint, this refinement holds potential as a way of enhancing the effective evaluation and prioritization of more promising innovative product candidates, which would assist in organizational resource allocation, risk management and strategic alignment.

Our study extends and empirically investigates current technology management theory by integrating project management, portfolio management and strategy to enhance the Diamond model of project management resulting in a model which is aligned with internal firm performance and external competitiveness. The suggested model may be used for differentiating, prioritizing, and selecting investment in technological projects within an organization’s portfolio. Specifically, the Diamond Model of project management is focused primarily on internal factors and probabilities of technical success, whereas the extended version includes market attractiveness measures represented by size and growth; and development costs, which allows for resource allocation across projects. This boundary spanning between traditional project management and venture capital project criteria may offer a more robust and comprehensive assessment model. We developed a project portfolio evaluation model, which includes seven key dimensions. These dimensions have been identified in multidisciplinary literature of project management, portfolio management and venture capital. First, projects should be assessed with respect to the external environment (i.e., market attractiveness) defined as overall current and potential market size, growth rates, and project aim (Dey, 2006). Our model focused on the dimensions of size and growth. Secondly, each project needs to be assessed in terms of its innate attributes. Drawing from the Diamond model and venture capital project assessment criteria, our adaptation assessed development costs, development time (pace), and manufacturing complexity (complexity) (Shenhar and Dvir, 2007). The above model was employed to analyse the Industrial Research Limited (IRL) portfolio of wound healing technologies and associated products. Studying a portfolio within a single industry and organizational context provided a useful basis for assessing project management characteristics for managing a portfolio of early stage, high risk programs. Our results suggest that the application of the model to IRLs portfolio of projects may provide an objective assessment of internal capabilities and external competitiveness, thereby providing a basis for IRL to prioritize and preferentially allocate scarce resources within a portfolio of heterogeneous technologies aimed at a single commercial application. We propose that the model helped differentiate between five nascent technology products with equally low current levels of legitimacy, while at the same time enhancing legitimacy by providing an objective and transparent rationale for decision-making. For practitioners, our findings suggest that pre-screening projects versus common criteria enables funding decisions to be objectively assessed by senior managers over the entire portfolio, establishes a baseline for updates and future assessment, and allows real-time portfolio assessment of weightings to ensure appropriate overall risk management. In addition, these results suggest that project selection criteria should include commercial assessment (e.g., market size, growth rates) to ensure project value-risk tradeoffs are optimized. Finally, an extension of this model may include stage-gates or milestones that trigger continued funding, as well as accelerate ‘fast failure’ or termination and rapid commercial scaling for successful projects, as this has been found as a best practice, especially in innovative projects (Besner and Hobbs, 2008). The model put forward here is one that managers may use to accelerate fast failure while preferentially scaling successful projects. Limitations and associated extensions of this study include the use of IRL as indicative of the portfolio management experience of other organizations. As such, more cases of research and development-based firms across international boundaries, as well as multiple industries, would be useful in enabling comparisons and contrasts in building theoretical and practical insights. Further, future research could more actively compare the suggested model to other project and performance management tools. We also acknowledge that this study assumes the right set of projects have emerged to consider and provides a ‘top/down’ perspective. In this context, testing these results relative to the selection of technologies and levels of innovation (Latour, 1991), practice-based perspectives in project management (Hodgson and Cicmil, 2006), and strategic management (Whittington, 2006) would be a useful extension and integration of this framework. In summary, we believe that our approach to extending the Diamond model framework by integrating the efficiency goals of project management with the external focus of firm level strategy and competitiveness may be useful in differentiating, prioritizing, and selecting projects within a firm’s organizational portfolio under conditions of uncertainty. Our model can be used to gather internal and external input to better understand and manage product innovation and risk at the project and firm levels of analysis. As such, it may be a useful tool for technology industry managers, charged with guiding their firms’ products based on nascent technologies to market successfully.