OVERVIEW

Investment intensity is one of the critical components of VIP management. In making investment intensity decisions, the organization gets serious: about validating the data supporting the opportunity, making its portfolio decisions into reality and committing to spend money. As we said in Chapter 8, the goal of the VIP process is to commit the right resources at the right time, at the right level and focused in the right areas. By doing so, you build the capabilities to fully deliver the promised customer value at the expected purchasing volume, enabling you to hit the market sweet spot.

Investment intensity planning how you choreograph resources focuses on two areas: (1) investing to establish needed capabilities in the arenas of technology foundation, market presence, and business infrastructure and (2) investing to acquire the insights and data to effectively guide planning and implementation as you move toward and into full commercialization. The big-dollar investments usually fall in the former category, but the latter yields the most leverage. This appendix offers perspectives on some of the elements required to successfully manage investment intensity in the VIP and examines, through a case study example, the dynamics that affect investment intensity decision making.

Investment intensity is part of the VIP dynamic governance framework we described in Chapter 9 and so is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process whereby organizational leadership regularly adjusts resource commitments in response to new information, whether from internal sources (e.g., the results of a technology development program...