Strategic Dimensions of Innovation

Strategy & Innovation is founded on the latest thinking and best practice, bringing our strength and reputation in the fields of strategy and innovation to help executives navigate the long journey successfully and realize their strategic organizational and personal potential.

It helps to:

  • Identify and overcome the challenges that companies face when trying to innovate
  • Develop new ventures within long- or newly-established organizations
  • Adopt new strategic approaches to company direction and decision-making in order to build successful business models which exploit new opportunities
  • Take new approaches to stakeholder management, governance, and funding
  • Develop robust but flexible plans for strategic execution.

 

Innovation Strategy is the essential link between new product development efforts and your overall Business Strategy. A company’s Business Strategy defines: key objectives, overall direction, priority initiatives, and the expected pace of growth.

The Innovation Strategy is what enables companies that rely on innovative new products, technologies, and platforms to advance their Business Strategies to:

  • create customer value
  • grow market share
  • enter new markets
  • increase profitability
  • Alter market and competitive

 

The 6 Elements of an Effective Innovation Strategy

Top performing companies consistently approach the following 6 elements of an effective Innovation Strategy as the ideal flow, or thought process, to guide leadership teams in developing an insightful Innovation Strategy:

 

  • Objectives and Role

Specify the objectives of the new product development effort and the role product innovation will play in helping the company achieve its business objectives.

  • Arenas (place or scene of activity) and Strategic Thrust (push   suddenly)

Focus is key to an effective Innovation Strategy. Specify where you will and will not attack. The concept of strategic arenas is at the heart of Innovation Strategy – the markets, industry sectors, applications, product types, or technologies where your business will focus its efforts. Specifying these arenas is fundamental to defining the strategic thrust of the new product development effort. It is the result of identifying and assessing new product innovation opportunities at the strategic level.

  • Attack Strategy and Entry Strategy

How do you plan to attack each strategic arena? You may choose to be aggressive and be the industry innovator (first to market); or a fast follower, waiting and watching, and rapidly copying and improving upon competitive entries. Other strategies focus onbeing low-cost versus a differentiator versus a niche player. The global dimension is also part of the attack plan: whether to adopt a global, or regional strategic approach to product development.

  • Deployment

Spending Commitments, Priorities and Strategic Buckets Strategy becomes real when you start spending money! How much you spend on new product development and the emphasis you place on each strategic arena naturally leads to the next key decision to bucket resources for each arena. Assigning buckets of resources helps to ensure new product development is strategically aligned with your overall business goals.

  • The Strategic Product Roadmap 

Major Initiatives and Platform Developments A strategic product roadmap is an effective way to communicate a series of major initiatives in your attack plan. Your strategy should map out your planned major new product development initiatives (and their timing) required to succeed in a certain market or sector. It may also specify platform developments required for these new products.

  • Tactical Portfolio Management Decisions   

Project       Selection using a method to monitor Innovation Strategy execution improves the odds that you will successfully implement it. However, due to the unique and risky nature of innovation, monitoring progress via a master project implementation schedule is simply not Not every project that is initiated will be worth completing. As new ideas make their way through the Stage-Gate process, their initial attractiveness can improve or wane as new information becomes available.

Marketing Dimensions of innovation

Storytelling plays a huge role in establishing disruptive technology as a market force. Good storytelling is important when introducing a complex and disruptive offering in the marketplace whose value is not well understood. But storytelling is only the beginning. It takes a village to launch and drive adoption. Each year, new technology emerges and continues to change the way we live, work and play. Sometimes, it only provides incremental benefits, but on occasion, something new emerges that is truly innovative and shifts the existing paradigm. Examples of paradigm-shifting technologies include block chain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Although the primary focus of any launch is the solution that solves a particular problem, the technology becomes the enabler -- the how and why of a problem that couldn’t be solved for before. Some would argue that buyers don’t need to understand the underlying technology; however, we strongly disagree. Customers are buying into a longer-term vision and need to understand the viability of the new technology.  Launching a solution with a technology that provides incremental benefits is significantly more straightforward than introducing a disruptive technology. For incremental technology, the context within the market already exists to help target audiences easily understand its value, whereas context needs to be created from scratch for anything that is paradigm-shifting.

So, exactly what do you need to campaign disruptive technology?

  • Captivating Vision

Buyers need a roadmap to understand where the technology is today and where it will be in two years, in five years and in 10 years. The vision needs to be simple, relatable and futuristic.

For example, in the mid-1990s, when the internet was still in the early-adopter phase, we had a client who was working on the leading edge of voice recognition technology. He would begin every briefing and speaking opportunity similar to this:

One day, you are going to be able to pick up the phone and just say, ‘I want a pizza at 6 p.m.’ At 6 p.m., your favorite pizza from your favorite restaurant will show up at the door, and it will already be paid for.” At the time, this statement was like something from The Jetsons -- no one had articulated a vision like it. It captivated the audience before he proceeded to talk about his innovation, which was the first step on the road map to achieving that vision. Twenty years later, with Alexa and Siri, his long-term vision is beginning to become a reality.

  • Perseverance 

Timing is everything. Introducing something new to the market and driving adoption takes a long time. Technology needs to be stable enough, and the market needs to be ready to hear your message. Given the previous example, it has taken more than 20 years for that vision to become a reality. This is not always the case; however, it is important to realize that campaigning a new technology can take years, not months.

  • A Value Proposition That Makes Sense

Disruptive technologies typically solve complex business problems or create new business opportunities that can be hard to understand. You need a value proposition that is simple and clear, and focuses on outcomes and not on the complexities of how a particular solution works.

  • The Right Market Category

Market categories provide context for what exists in a market segment. Analysts -- industry and financial -- who publish market reports play a pivotal role in how your solution and technology will be viewed in the market. They use market categories to group and report on solutions and technologies. An incremental technology usually falls into an existing category, even if it is on the fringe or a subset of that category. For example, the cloud is a major category, whereas hybrid cloud and multi-cloud diversification are applications of the cloud and are categorized as subsets. Developing a brand-new category for a disruptive technology takes time and money. You need to work closely with analysts to educate them and convince them that your disruptive technology is worth following and recommending.

  • A Charismatic Spokesperson 

There is nothing worse than listening to someone drone on and on about something that nobody understands. You need a spokesperson who is an avid storyteller and who can captivate an audience.

  • Involvement In The Ecosystem

No technology stands on its own. It is critical that you demonstrate involvement in the industry. This can take the form of driving standards, joining an association, participating in industry events or collaborating with others in the ecosystem.

  • Incremental Milestones To Drive Adoption

Prospective customers are not going to make big investments or swap out a solution that is currently working for an unproven technology. However, they are often willing to make incremental investments as test projects -- as long as the risk is mitigated. To drive adoption, your road map needs to have incremental milestones as opposed to quantum leaps.

  • A Content Strategy That Drives The Conversation 

Don’t be afraid to create bold and somewhat controversial content. You will need primers, glossaries, e-books, case studies, solutions briefs, videos, social images and technology papers with strong and captivating visuals.

  • Public Relations

Creating an industry narrative for disruptive technology is difficult and often takes senior talent to be effective. Consider hiring a creative PR team or working with a contractor who understands technology and has experience with emerging tech. Professional PR efforts can get your technology into the current media conversation.

  • A Community Of Early Adopters

Stay in touch with early adopters so that you can learn more about what is working and what is not working. Bring them into your storytelling, and give them the platform so they can tell their stories as they relate to your solution.

You can do this by creating a customer council, co-speaking at industry events, developing joint-bylined articles or collaborating on content marketing.