P1: H., researcher
there are two types of portfolio managers. The ones who manage a spreadsheet—and you see a lot of them in big departments with hundreds of small innovation projects. They keep a kind of scoreboard: who is doing what, how much time it costs, and then in that spreadsheet they try to prevent too many people from colliding with each other. And then you have the innovation manager who actually has a mandate—who is more managerial/leading. That person will take a different course: they will focus less on whether everything is administratively recorded on paper, and more on whether it leads to value and whether it’s actually adopted. So I do see two types of innovation managers. And the larger the organization, the bigger the risk that a collection of innovations is called a “portfolio.” But that’s not quite true. If you have a portfolio, you must be able to manage it—meaning you can say: this project and that project conflict; we shouldn’t do both, because that’s waste. That requires a very different role and responsibility. With a spreadsheet you can signal it, but you don’t really have authority over it.
P2: L., more F not really PM
Decisions are made based on financial and time investment. Up to around €10,000 in hours, the team lead decides. Above that it goes to the head of innovation, and above €50,000 it goes to the MT — though mainly when we’re committing co-financing or a significant flow of money is involved. Substantive decisions are trusted to the colleagues who work directly with the companies, tested with the team lead. I’m team lead for Horticulture and Life Science & Health, and within the sector plans we draw up together every few years, I can largely make those calls myself
P3: L., not really PM
In terms of deciding which projects to pursue, we work mainly demand-driven. We don’t see a grant and then think up something for it — it’s the other way around. We hear what’s happening in the region, bring parties together, and then find out where the resources can come from. Sometimes a request comes from a school or an external organisation, but very often we are the driving force ourselves.
P4: L., more F
Over the years the themes have shifted from flooding to drought to water quality, and most recently biodiversity came up — the province came to us after an EU directive and asked what we could test. We don’t decide on those thematic additions alone. I put them on the agenda of the steering group, where dike managers, directors, and aldermen sit, and we discuss together whether it fits what we can do here and whether we’re the right party for it.
P5: S., PM RWS
When there are different opinions within the organisation, someone needs to have the mandate to say: I’ve heard both sides, and we’re going left. That’s really a thing for us. You genuinely need an owner of an innovation who has the authority to make that call. With the asphalt rejuvenation cream example, the responsible director ran into a problem with a particular unit and simply couldn’t get their capacity — they were stuck with other priorities. That’s why you need things escalated to a high enough level. That’s also the strength of innovation portfolio management: you have a large portfolio, you have to make choices, and you need someone at the top who can be called on when things get stuck. We’re also developing what we call an ‘opgave portfolio’ — a challenge portfolio. The idea is to bring together the top-down strategic priorities and the bottom-up signals from people on the ground who are running into problems right now. If one region keeps hitting a certain issue, and it turns out another region has the same problem, and another part of the organisation does too, then you get a kind of common ground — ‘there’s really something important here, we need to do something with this.’ We try to involve our stakeholders in that too.
P6: M., PM Novum
Decision-making is layered and shared: the strategic innovation manager sets the overall direction and cuts through uncertainty when needed, while the PM coordinates and prioritises based on that direction (the innovation designer facilitates projects in terms of process). The most important decisions sit at the front end of a project — does it meet the ‘novum innovation method’ requirements, are we going to do this, with whom, and does it fit our way of working? Interim decisions about deviations from the method are made consciously and explicitly, not taken silently. An important insight is that informal decision-making carries at least as much weight as formal: the PM notes that people who have been kept well informed along the way are far less likely to reject a project at a formal decision point — good information provision is therefore itself a steering instrument.