Counsulting Area
Future-driven Innovation
Find your game changers through future-driven innovation
5 Steps to Turn your Business Into an Innovation Machine
Get the story in your inbox
When we talk to executives and innovation managers, we sometimes hear that it’s not the ideas that are lacking, but the execution – the ability to take the ideas to the market, or implement process innovations in the organization. Other times, we get a completely different message; it’s not the resources but the ideas that are lacking. We simply don’t have enough good ideas, executives say.
We believe that both sides might be right, but what we’ve noticed is that very few companies have a systematic process to generate new ideas. That seems especially true when it comes to greenfield innovation or development of new innovation platforms. And the consequence of that is an overemphasis on short-term incremental innovation, with no chance to change the name of the game. Most companies also need a game changer every now and then.
Based on over 20 years of consulting and research, we’ve fine-tuned a process that overcomes the problems above. We call it future-driven innovation, and it starts with the exploration of trends, uncertainties and opportunities in the business and consumer landscape. Sometimes we support the process with our co-creation platform Co:tunity.
Over the years we’ve assisted dozens of companies and organizations in identifying new innovation platforms and game-changers in a variety of industries in several countries. Marabou’s Premium chocolate line is just one of many results of that process.
By a combination of systematic generation and evaluation of new ideas, the client is able to measure all new opportunities with the same yardstick, regardless of whether those ideas and opportunities are strategic or tactical, process or product innovations. It also makes the balancing between short-term modifications and long-term value easier. Often, the ideas are evaluated in a similar way as we evaluate portfolios of other strategic initiatives.
At the end of the day, a simple question remains: does your organization have enough initiatives in the pipeline to safeguard success three, five or ten years from now?