Whitepaper: Innovation Models & Strategy
Global organizations are increasingly looking to reinvent themselves to match their customer’s evolving preferences. This has resulted in the emergence of several forms of innovation, driving disruption across industries. The definition of innovation differs across industries, ranging from creating, acquiring to partnering with emerging technological solutions.
With significant investments required to drive sustainable innovation, leadership teams are continuously looking to track their return-on-investment. However, the rapid delivery of products and services hampers the accuracy of this information. The lack of monetary returns often results in the axing of innovation divisions and their initiatives. Traditional business metrics in no way suit innovative processes and provide a limited perspective of their value.
Innovation teams are therefore put in a position where they need to win over executive leadership as well as middle management across their organization. The lack of an innovative culture amplifies the difficulty to lead strategic business and organizational change. In addition, teams need to continuously test their initiatives to ensure they are driving business value through their innovation. This is a necessary step to obtain the support required for consumer-facing innovation across products and services.
Corporate innovation teams can overcome these innovation barriers by creating a structured blueprint that highlights project timelines, costs, and returns. This document can be used by executive sponsors and corporate leadership to accelerate internal innovation. It can also enable the assessment and allocation of resources involved in a company’s innovation efforts.
The Business Model Canvas is an alternative to a traditional business plan that enables entrepreneurs to focus on their business’ key drivers and core growth elements, with the required adaptability and transparency for investors. While immensely valuable to entrepreneurs and business owners, it can also be adapted for corporate innovation teams.
This publication dissects corporate innovation, providing a closer look at its characteristics, variations, and the measurement of returns. It focuses on how to drive a cross-organizational innovation culture to accelerate experimentation and most importantly, the acceptance of failure. Finally, this report also presents the adaptation of the Business Model Canvas by corporate teams to enhance the design and delivery of innovation programs.