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. More and more often, established companies feel like unwieldy “tankers” that are overtaken on the left and right by agile start-ups and companies with disruptive technologies. As a result, innovation methods have been increasingly copied from the supposedly better-positioned start-ups in the last decade. Design Thinking, Lean Start-up and Co. 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. As a reaction, many companies founded separate InnovationLabs, incubators and Co. But here, too, success was mostly absent, as innovations on the “green field” have the same chances of success as those of start-ups. And these are very low compared to the demands of an established company.

“The chances of a start-up achieving a value contribution of 500 million euros are just 1:17,000.”
_{Chris Zook, Harvard Business Review, 2016}

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“Efficient innovation” for leveraging the core business and meeting new customer needs

The situation is different if the core business is leveraged instead of working solely on a “greenfield site,” as start-up methods propagate. In this case, the chance increases by over 2000x to 1:8. However, to realize this opportunity, a systematic innovation approach is necessary, one that can handle the complexity of the company as well as the 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 company's traction), and at the same time as disruptive as necessary (to meet new customer needs).
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