You have determined that your company is ready to start a
growth portfolio, you have included a group of products that you feel
will allow your company to be innovative and have the best chance at
growing profits, and you have been careful to avoid pitfalls such as
rolling out too many products or hanging on to past successes and not
pressing forward.� So what’s next? How do you measure the success of
your innovation portfolio?�
Tracking Your Success
There
are two ways of tracking your success: quantitatively and
qualitatively.� Quantitative measures include numbers of new customers
obtained, growth as a percentage of sales from the new products or the
overall ROI from an individual product.� The qualitative method of
measurement goes deeper than just the numbers.� These measurements track
how well the product was received by the target market, or by the
market as a whole, how it affected the perceptions of your company, or
how much effort went into effectively managing the portfolio.�
In
order to achieve both qualitative and quantitative results, extensive
market research must be conducted after the product is launched and
established in the market.� Depending on when, how, and where your
product was launched, you are going to receive different data from
different regions.� You must determine if certain technologies are more
widely accepted in different regions of the country, during different
times of the year, etc.� Being able to properly analyze this data will
allow your company to improve its growth and success during its next
product launch.� Successfully analyzing your previous product rollouts,
whether huge successes or colossal failures, is an important step
towards keeping innovation moving forward in your company.�
A
big part of innovation is staying on top of market trends, understanding
customer needs and wants, and consistently looking to the future to
grow the company, not relying on past successes to keep the company
afloat.� The best way to remain ahead of the curve when it comes to
market innovation is understanding� how to effectively gauge the success
of past campaigns and applying methods that work to your future growth
portfolio projects.�
If you missed our last article about Delivering on Target or any of our past articles on effectively sustaining innovation in your company, you can find all of them here.