Comments on: Should You “Exnovate” your Product Portfolio?

By: Jim Brown

Jim Brown — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:37:39 +0000

Stan,
Thanks for the your comments and the references. I guess the tie to exnovation was a stretch? To me, they are both ways of clearing the clutter of past innovation to make room for the new. Thanks for sharing your insight.

Jim

By: Stan Przybylinski

Stan Przybylinski — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:57:37 +0000

I am not sure that exnovation is the right term for what you are trying to do. It refers to innovations that we actually adopted by organizations that have to be removed before NEW innovations can be adopted. (I guess you can exnovate within product development organizations, but even THEY have not necessarily adopted things to the point where extracting them is painful.)

Your discussion is more about culling our portfolios, something that PPM is supposed to help us to do, right? But there are MANY good books on innovation and the innovation process that talk about how HARD it is to say NO once a project gets rolling. (“Breakthroughs!” was one of the first pop business volumes on this topic – http://www.amazon.com/Breakthroughs-P-Ranganath-Nayak/dp/0893842508 – although this one has a pro-innovation bias.)

By: Stan Przybylinski

Stan Przybylinski — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:47:42 +0000

Thought I had a copy of the source book – perhaps in a past organizational life:

Kimberly, J (1981). Managerial Innovation. In Nystrom, P and Starbuck, W (eds.), ‘Handbook of Organizational Design-Volume 1.’ New
York: Oxford University Press, pp.84-104.