Building Bottom-Up Mission Portfolios:Introducing the BUMP framework

Mission-oriented approaches to society’s “wicked” problems are gaining momentum in both research and practice. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the formative phase of a mission—especially how its early portfolio of innovation projects takes shape and evolves. This paper adopts a managerial lens to theoretically recommend how such portfolios can be composed, expanded, and governed. We argue that a mission’s innovation portfolio provides the clearest snapshot of a mission’s near-term agenda: what has been achieved, what is under way, and what is planned to address challenges such as securing clean water, reducing homelessness, or building resilient, sustainable energy systems. The research question guiding this conceptual work is: How is it possible to build and elaborate a mission portfolio that intentively<br/>seeks to resolve wicked problems through dynamic top-down and bottom-up processes of multistakeholder co-creation? Drawing on the literatures on innovation-portfolio management and mission management, we introduce ‘BUMP – Bottom-Up Mission Portfolios’, a processual framework that maps how dispersed initiatives from a managerial perspective can be integrated into a coherent mission-driven portfolio. BUMP clarifies the managerial touchpoints, decision rules, and feedback loops that enable a mission to remain both goal-oriented and adaptive. For practitioners, the framework sets actionable boundaries that help structure and qualify managerial work when guiding portfolios of mission projects.