Doing the right innovation projects is critical to firm's success; therefore, academics and practitioners are striving for optimizing innovation project portfolio management (IPPM). Although some research on certain issues in IPPM has been conducted so far, valid empirical evidence on the use, outcomes, and most important success drivers of portfolio methods in innovation management is rare. We aim at discovering the cause-and-effects of IPPM performance. This paper shows that performance of IPPM may be better understood if it is considered as an integrated system of portfolio balance, strategic alignment, and value maximization simultaneously. Using in-depth data from 29 interviews in 12 companies, we use a grounded theory approach to develop a general model of what drives IPPM in detail and how these causes are related to effects on both project performance and firm performance. According to the findings from these qualitative data, effective IPPM is the result of three constructs: usage of IPPM methods, IPPM design, and project characteristics. These cause-and-effects are moderated by management perception and satisfaction with IPPM.Index Terms-Innovation project characteristics, innovation project portfolio, portfolio balance, portfolio methods, qualitative study.
Firms face the challenge of efficiently and effectively investing scarce resources in innovation projects in order to sustain or develop a firm's long‐term competitive advantage and sustainable growth. Innovation project portfolio management (IPPM) describes a firm's dynamic capability to assess the challenge of evaluating, selecting, and prioritizing innovation projects. The particular impacts of method usage, criteria usage, IPPM design, information availability, and internal interactions on management perception and satisfaction as well as on IPPM performance and innovativeness are hypothesized and tested. We found that methods and criteria play a negligible role in the IPPM context. IPPM design elements, like transparency and formality, are key drivers of high IPPM performance. Information availability is a key construct in driving IPPM performance, as well as management perception and satisfaction. Relevance of IPPM is supported by revealing IPPM performance's positive impact on firm performance, innovation project performance, and firm's innovativeness.
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