If your company’s performance has been stagnating and even despite your best efforts you’ve been unable to unlock growth then strategic innovation may be just what you need.

What is 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 consumers, customers and the company.

The strategic innovation process 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.

In this way a company can discover many more options and many more opportunities.

Perhaps that all sounds a bit ‘blue sky’. Or maybe you have concerns about whether strategic innovation will deliver tangible business benefits for your company.

Well, rest assured. Like other innovation processes, strategic innovation requires inquiry and creativity during the fuzzy front end, followed by detailed idea development to ensure successful execution that delivers results and growth to the business.

Two Types of Thinking.

Strategic innovators need to practise two types of thinking. Firstly, they need to develop their expansive visionary thinking and be able to focus on long term possibilities. After that they need to switch into a thinking mode that is pragmatic and enables them to focus on implementation activities. These actions, in turn will lead to series of measurable business impacts – stretching into the future – but starting NOW.

Through the process of strategic innovation teams create a lot more than just analysis, strategies and plans. Integral to the process of strategic innovation is the testing and refining of options. This in turn will deliver more information that can inform the plans further for the next round of testing.

Strategic innovation is suitable for any organisation. In particular, if a company is suffering from stagnant performance, feels hemmed in by hyper-competition, or feels segments if not the whole of their markets are becoming commoditised, then strategic innovation can be a powerful antidote.

Strategic innovation can help you uncover new paths where you thought there were none and opportunities where previously you could only see threats.

Three Dimensions of Strategic Innovation.

1. Do Strategy Differently

Historically, when company teams have ‘done strategy’ they have set off with a mindset that the future will be stable and pretty much like the present. They have been generally seeking to preserve and fine tune the existing business model. They have used analytical strategy tools like 5 Forces, PESTEL and Value Chain Analysis.

In strategic innovation, teams set off with a mindset that things are unstable and they expect the future to be different from the present. They are looking to generate and test a series of new business models. They use creative tools alongside foresight and insight tools, and these help them to identify ways to disrupt the status quo and develop new business models.

2. Redefining Your Business

Typically, the strategic goal of an organisation is focused on beating the competition. In strategic innovation the focus is more on finding a path for the organisation that capitalises on the organisation’s unique competencies.

In order to do this, the  strategic innovation process helps teams challenge industry assumptions, look at substitute products and their industries, blur the boundaries of their industry.

The strategic innovation process also helps you uncover ‘hidden assets’ be that intellectual property, customer and technical service, process expertise or something else.

3. Focus on Business Model Innovation

Strategic innovation focuses on business model innovation and rightly so.  Research has shown that  although most companies spend most of their innovation effort on product and service innovation, it takes less effort and creates disproportionally more value to innovate your business model.

Want to know more about strategic innovation?

Download the brochure for Anatellô’s Strategic Innovation Training course

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