Innovation Portfolio Management: A Synthesis and Research Agenda

Innovation portfolio management ( IPM ) addresses the resource allocation across a firm's portfolio of new product development projects consistent with corporate strategy. The paper provides a comprehensive review of IPM research and offers new conceptual arguments by systematizing prior findings in the following four categories: optimization perspective, strategic perspective, decision‐making perspective and organizational perspective. These different approaches to IPM have been largely disconnected so far, but they can complement one another to provide new theoretical insights into a critical topic in innovation research. The different approaches are therefore integrated into an overarching perspective and a detailed research agenda is proposed.