Strategic innovation

In recent years, companies have become increasingly aware of the crucial importance of innovations for growth and future success. At the same time, it has become increasingly challenging, especially for established companies, to compete with traditional innovations (such as technological inventions from research and development departments), against business model innovations and customer-centric developments from technology companies and start-ups. Increasingly, established companies feel like lumbering "tankers" being overtaken right and left by agile startups and companies with disruptive technologies. This has led to an increasing number of innovation methods being copied by the supposedly better-positioned start-ups over the past decade. This is how design thinking, lean strat-up and the like found their way into established companies. The problem: In the complex corporate realities of large companies, these methods quickly reach their limits and usually fail at the latest during implementation. In response, many companies set up separate innovation labs, incubators and the like. But even here, success usually failed to materialize, since greenfield innovations have the same chances of success as start-ups. And these are very low when measured against the demands of an established company.

"The odds of a startup reaching 500 million in value are just 1 in 17,000."
_{Chris Zook, Harvard Business Review, 2016}

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"Efficient innovation" to exploit core business and meet new customer needs

The situation is different if it is possible to leverage the core business instead of just working on the "greenfield" as propagated by start-up methods: Then the chance increases by a factor of over 2,000 to 1:8. However, in order for this chance to be realized, a systematic approach to innovation is required, which can deal with the complexity of the company as well as with changes in the environment. The goal: to develop innovations that are as efficient as possible, as close to the core business as possible (to leverage the traction of the company) and at the same time as disruptive as necessary (to meet new customer needs).

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