The past decades often offered companies a comparatively stable business environment. Individual crises at longer intervals and relatively slow change cycles enabled linear planning in which entrepreneurial risks could be well anticipated and addressed. In this environment, most companies were able to focus on defending, efficiently exploiting and incrementally optimizing competitive advantages once they had been built up (business model, competencies, resources, etc.).
Today, the pace of change is much faster, with multiple crises overlapping and developments often exponential. This dynamic and increasingly uncertain environment also means the end of long-term sustainable competitive advantages. But if the adaptability of companies is lower than the speed of change of the environment, they lose their "strategic fit": existing competitive advantages become irrelevant before new ones have been developed.
To avoid this danger, conventional strategic management must be supplemented by strategic entrepreneurship. By building the capability for strategic renewal, new competitive advantages can be continuously developed by exploiting the existing core business to ensure strategic fit and thus future survival and growth of the company.
Based on practical experience from over 100 innovation and strategy projects, application-oriented publications, and academic research, this white paper provides an overview of a holistic strategic renewal system for building the relevant capabilities for organizational agility. This can serve as a foundation for established companies to target the key organizational levers for their enduring sustainability. This will not only enable them to better cope with uncertain, increasingly rapid change, but even to profit from it in the future!
