Technology priority was being set by one or two individuals. 1.
Technologists and product planners used different criteria 2.
Prioritization was being set from a single, technological 3.
perspective.
It was clear that an alternative approach to portfolio prioritization
was needed, one that would incorporate collective intelligence and
diminish over-reliance on the expert opinion of one or two individu-
als. We developed a collaborative approach to portfolio prioritization,
which we call Wisdom of Crowds, which is based on the concepts of
the book by the same name (see the boxes on pages 28 and 31).
for this technique coming into the session, and even though his
personal priorities had been different, in retrospect the Wisdom of
Crowds result felt right. We had now identified the right technolo-
gies, whose timing was right, which could then be implemented
in the right products.
Prioritizing technology portfolios
We decided to test this concept. We wanted to know if the right
diverse crowd was assembled, using a transparent process, where
the individuals in the crowd were all equal on the hill of influence,
facilitated by individuals without bias and committed only to the
execution of the process, would the crowd create a priority result
that has a higher probability of cross-organizational buy-in and
implementation?
A cross-organizational crowd consisting of technologists, strate-gists, product marketers, and product developers was assembled
to prioritize the portfolio of like technologies as a team. Discus-sion, debate, qualitative scoring, and Wisdom of Crowd voting
did indeed generate distinct bands of priorities.
Ordinal ranking of the technologies is not the goal of the
portfolio technique, as this type of rank-
ing provides little value (see Exhibit 2).
What is of value is to understand which
technologies provide the highest value
and are the likeliest to be implemented
(those in gray), which technologies
provided little value or are not yet
implementable, and which technolo-
gies need continued development and
oversight but are deemed both valu-
able and implementable. As a result of
the Wisdom of Crowds approach, the
cross-organizational team identified a
small set of high-value technologies
that could be carried forward to product
groups for consideration of product
implementation.
Due to the success of the pilot, we ap-
plied the Wisdom of Crowds technique
on other like-technology portfolios,
and the results were consistent: Clear
priority of technologies emerged, expert
bias was muted, equality of opinion and
broad agreement of the outcome was
achieved. In one session, a senior Intel
technologist who had in the past set
the technology priorities individually,
commented that he had low expectations
Moving from technologies to products
Using the Wisdom of Crowds technique to prioritize portfolios
of technologies was significant progress but still insufficient.
We realized that the technique had to be repeated on the product
side of the Valley of Death to fully affect the innovation transfer
process.
We teamed with a product planner and planning team who were
in the early stages of defining a complex new product targeted for
launch in 2012. The job of a product planner is difficult, especially
when trying to select and prioritize the various features, technolo-gies, usages, and components to be included in a product. The
difficulty stems from the process of sorting through input from the
various sources bringing innovation ideas forward for inclusion—
with each innovation being positioned as the most valuable option.
This brought a level of uncertainty to the collaborative prioritiza-tion process. Unlike prioritizing like technologies where one can
do an apples-to-apples comparison, we realized prioritization of
product features, technologies, usages and components would be
an apples-to-oranges-to-rocks-to-twigs comparison.
The results, however, were consistent with previous outcomes.
Combinations of various features, technologies, usages, and
Exhibit 2: Sample technologies chart—using the Wisdom of Crowds
technique for evaluation of each technology
