Resources, processes, and priorities — RPP — are the three organizational capabilities that describe how a company's core business operates and gets things done, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his 2006 HBR article. BRI applies the framework as a strategic diagnostic of company fit, evaluating the alignment between a company's existing RPPs and what a new innovation needs to succeed. RPP mismatch is the #1 killer of innovation in mature companies — not bad ideas, weak validation, or market timing. The cumulative impact of many small frictions across mismatched resources, processes, or priorities kills the project, even when no single friction point looks fatal.
Clayton Christensen introduced the idea of resources, process, and priorities, or RPP, in a 2006 HBR article, “Assessing Your Company’s Capabilities: Resources, Processes, and Priorities.”[1] Simply put, RPPs are the resources, priorities, and procedures that a company uses to get work done. RPPs evolve organically from a business’s strategy and core business, and for a good reason: They increase operational efficiency, keep things running smoothly, and optimize the core business. Their resistance to change or redirection is part and parcel of that optimization function—RPPs keep the company on track. The problem arises when the company tries to rely on its existing RPPs, which have been optimized for the company’s core business model, to support a transformational innovation business model. The result is a potentially fatal Company-Fit RPP mismatch.
Resources are the tangible and intangible assets a company uses to support its business; they include people, equipment, technology, product designs, brands, information, cash, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Resources are comparatively easy to realign and tend to be the focus of big decisions.
Processes are patterns of interaction, coordination, communication, and decision making through which companies accomplish their work. Processes include both the ways that products are developed and made, or services are offered and the methods by which procurement, market research, budgeting, employee development, and resource allocation are accomplished.
Priorities emerge from the company’s core business model and strategy, and they provide the basis for individual and group incentives. Priorities reflect senior executives’ decisions to fund one new product proposal and kill another or a salesperson’s decisions about which customers to call on, which products to push with those customers, and which products to deemphasize. When an engineer makes a design choice, or a production scheduler puts one order ahead of another, he or she is making a prioritization decision.
Processes and priorities become embedded in the company’s culture and thus are very difficult, if not impossible, to change or realign. They create the tiny points of friction that, as they accumulate, can kill an innovation. Transformational innovations are particularly vulnerable to these frictions and pressures because they typically involve business model innovation, which demands changes in resources, processes or priorities.
We go into depth describing the significant implications that RPPs have on disruptive or transformative innovation efforts in our 3 part blog series on Digital Transformation. In it we use Digital Transformation as an example of an innovation effort that is distant from the core business to highlight the risks that unaliged RPPs create.
When Digital Transformation Collides with Operational Norms - Part 1 of 3
When Digital Transformation Collides with Operational Norms - Part 2 of 3
When Digital Transformation Collides with Operational Norms - Part 3 of 3
Even if an innovation projects are protected under the umbrella of a supportive leader with ambidextrous management, or an environment like a new business incubator or centralized innovation group, successful projects will eventually need to scale. When they scale there will be increasing pressure to leverage resources and competitencies from the core business for efficiencies or competitive advantage. This is another circumstance where misaligned RPPs will create challenges and risk. We examine this unique challenge with a composite case study from our years of experience within Intel.
Scaling Transformational New Businesses in Mature Companies: Part 1 - Introduction
Scaling Transformational New Businesses in Mature Companies: Part 2 - The Unique Challenges of Scaling
Scaling Transformational New Businesses in Mature Companies: Part 3 - What Went Wrong?
Scaling Transformational New Businesses in Mature Companies: Part 4 - Resolving the Transformational Innovation Dilemma
[1] C. M. Christensen and S. P. Kaugman, "Assessing Your Organization's Capabilities: Resources, Processes, and Priorities," Harvard Business Review, 13 September 2006. [Online]. Available: https://hbr.org/product/assessing-your-organization-s-capabilities-resources-processes-and-priorities/607014-PDF-ENG.
RPP-based Company Fit analysis is integral to BRI's Staged Innovation Methodology — the bundled offering that combines Innovation Methodology, Pipeline, and Portfolio Strategy. RPP risk surfaces during strategy hypothesis development on the Implementation Approach & Execution dimension of the Strategy Framework, and again at the portfolio layer in Innovation Portfolio Strategy mix decisions and Custom Governance design. The four-bucket resolution framework — Live with it, Change it, Create an exception, or Require a different governance model — is the operational expression of the diagnostic across stages.
Growth Forge operationalizes RPP analysis through dedicated FIT and RPP tools, used during strategy hypothesis development on the Implementation Approach dimension. Inputs are questions about strategic and functional team alignment. The output places each project on a four-quadrant matrix: Good Fit, Poor Fit, Lacks Support, or High Risk (the Hawthorne pattern).
RPP stands for Resources, Processes, and Priorities — Clayton Christensen's 2006 HBR framework describing how a company's core business operates and gets things done. Resources are the assets the company can deploy: capital, human resources, brands, IP, physical assets. Processes are how the company operates, formal and informal. Priorities are the relative importance of different activities — the basis for resource allocation decisions. BRI applies the framework as a strategic diagnostic of company fit, assessing the alignment between an organization's existing RPPs and what a new innovation needs to succeed.
Because RPP misalignment determines whether a company can actually execute a strategy — not just whether the strategy is sound. Even validated ideas with willing teams die when the parent organization's resources, processes, or priorities don't match what the new venture requires. The cumulative impact of many small frictions kills the project. No single friction point is fatal, but the accumulation is — and surface metrics often look healthy on RPP-killed projects right up until they aren't.
Explicit RPPs are consciously allocated by management — mission statements, strategic priority documents, written policies. Implicit RPPs are unspoken priorities and processes embedded in culture; they are far harder to identify because nobody has written them down and most people don't know they are there. A failure pattern: when the link between a KPI and the strategic objective it was originally designed to support is forgotten, the metric becomes dogma — making it a de facto strategy constraint that reshapes every downstream decision.
Senior executives don't experience RPP friction directly. Their positional authority lets them resolve individual issues, so they aren't exposed to the constant, low-level accumulation that the venture team feels every day. That's what makes Company Fit risks sneaky — and what makes them go undetected at the level where they are easiest to fix. Every failed transformational project also makes the underlying RPPs more deeply entrenched, raising the difficulty bar for the next attempt.
When RPP mismatches are surfaced, BRI places each one in one of four buckets, each implying a different action and a different cost. Live with it — not material enough to fight; plan for the friction. Change it — the RPP has outlived its usefulness; change it for the entire company. Create an exception — formalize a controlled exception process as part of the official innovation program. Require different governance model — the mismatch is fundamental enough that the new business needs its own governance (Custom Governance / Mezzanine pattern). The framework was developed during BRI's Intel NBI operations.
A signature BRI consulting offering that combines teaching the RPP framework with a structured workshop format for systematic RPP analysis. The client team defines core-business RPPs in detail, defines new-business RPP requirements in detail, and runs structured risk analysis and mitigation planning based on the differences between the two. Output: a worked RPP risk register with mitigations mapped to specific surfaced mismatches and assigned to the appropriate four-bucket placement.
[1] C. M. Christensen and S. P. Kaugman, "Assessing Your Organization's Capabilities: Resources, Processes, and Priorities," Harvard Business Review, 13 September 2006. [Online]. Available: https://hbr.org/product/assessing-your-organization-s-capabilities-resources-processes-and-priorities/607014-PDF-ENG.
