How Corporate Innovation Can Thump Startup Disruption

I don’t know about you but I’m tired of innovation contests that pursue the next shiny new object.  Yes, creating something cool and different generates excitement in employees and inspires their creativity.  But if their efforts don’t yield results, like increased customer loyalty, market share, or competitive advantage, then employees and leadership become disillusioned.  Is this really the best we can do?

A company that I partner with, Innovation Catalyst Group (ICG), proposes a different path to innovation.  Instead of starting in a blue ocean of unlimited options, their methodology develops adjacent opportunities that start with a business’s core competency: the strength of their operation, established customers, industry partners.  Sure, anything goes in a blue ocean but often that puts a big company in the same playing field as a small startup.  As a corporate leader, this is not where I want to play.  An established company has a huge advantage over a small startup, and we need to use that advantage to lead in our industry.

The ICG process starts with an analysis of a business’s assets, and develops investment ready options for consideration.  These options are the root of where corporate innovation should start, providing a sandbox for employee creativity that will yield real results.  The methodology goes through the following steps:

1. Discovery phase to focus the team on operational strengths and customer pain points
2. Ideation phase to explore strategic investment options
3. Convergence on the options that are most appealing based on different goals for growth
4. Presentation of investment ready options that include measures of customer and employee impact

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Imagine if your team had a set of investment ready options that you pitched to your employees as the source for innovation.  You would harness their creativity to focus on the strategies that provide a path to growth. That shiny new object they came up with would fit with your company’s core competency. The potential return for your business would be huge. And the return from employees seeing real results from their efforts?  Even greater.

Do you have a story to share about your corporate innovation efforts that followed this approach (or didn’t)? We’d like to hear about it.