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The Art and Discipline of Strategic
Innovation
Strategic Innovation is the creation of
growth strategies, new product categories, services or
business
models that change
the game and generate significant
new value for customers and the
corporation.
Serendipitous versus Strategic Innovation
Many organizations reply on serendipitous acts
of creativity to foster
innovation. Others
take an ad hoc unstructured approach, which often results in uninspired
incremental improvements or poor implementation.
Strategic innovation is a holistic systematic
approach focused on generating beyond incremental,
breakthrough or
discontinuous innovations. Innovation becomes "strategic" when it is an
intentional repeatable process that creates a significant difference in
the value delivered to consumers, customers, partners and the
corporation. A Strategic Innovation initiative generates a portfolio of
breakthrough business growth opportunities using a disciplined yet creative
process.
A Holistic, Multidisciplinary Framework
This paper describes a
holistic, multidisciplinary framework that enables organizations to take a strategic
approach to innovation.
The framework combines non-traditional,
creative approaches to
business innovation with conventional
strategy
development models. It brings together perspectives from several
disciplines: the non-traditional approaches to innovation found in the
business creativity movement; traditional strategy consulting; the
new
product development perspective of industrial design firms; qualitative
consumer/customer research; futures research found in think tanks and
traditional scenario planning; and organizational development (OD) practices
that examine the effectiveness of an
organization's culture,
processes and
structures.
The framework consists of a cohesive set of
practices that inspire imaginative teams to
look beyond the obvious, explore
a broad range of possibilities,
identify significant opportunities, make
informed decisions about the most promising paths to pursue, create a
shared
vision for growth, define pragmatic action plans that “bridge from the
future back to the present” and align the organization around the
requirements for success.
Strategic Innovation takes the road less
traveled – it challenges an organization to look beyond its established
business boundaries and mental models and to participate in an open-minded,
creative exploration of the realm of possibilities.
Some organizations may feel that seeking
breakthroughs is too grandiose a goal, and that they would be content with
“simply growing the business”. Experience shows, however, that focusing on
the short-term typically yields only short-term results – while teams
aspiring to seek significant breakthroughs will both identify “big ideas”
and also generate closer-in, incremental ideas.
Strategic Innovation is not characterized by
mundane, incremental product extensions, the “me-too” business models of
close followers, or band-aids for inefficient processes. It does not consist
of simple “facilitated creativity sessions and
brainstorming new ideas”. It
is not based on the linear principles of traditional
strategic planning
which extrapolate the past in an attempt to predict the future.
It does not
result in “pure blue sky”. Instead, it spans a journey of inquiry and
activity – from creative inspiration at the ambiguous “fuzzy front end”
through the detailed requirements of successful execution that lead to
business impact.
Strategic Innovation calls for a
holistic approach that operates on multiple levels. First, it blends non-traditional
and traditional approaches to
business strategy, deploying the practices of
“Industry Foresight”, “Consumer/Customer Insight” and “Strategic Alignment”
as a foundation, and supplementing them with conventional consulting models.
Second, it combines two seemingly paradoxical mindsets: expansive, visionary
thinking that imaginatively explores long-term possibilities; and pragmatic,
down-to-earth implementation activities that lead to short-term, measurable
business impact. |
