Innovation
Organisations often tackle the challenge of innovation systemically, trying to solve the entire puzzle by attempting to align idea generation, research and development, go-to-market approach, portfolio strategy, culture, and so on. Almost always this takes too long and gets bogged down in corporate dynamics. The root causes behind low innovation productivity is that companies sustain a number of erroneous beliefs:
- Innovation is static and can be defined upfront
- Innovation requires experts and ideation
- Innovation culture is important
- Innovation deals with the new/novel
As a result companies rapidly decline, when their innovation cycle is longer than the market cycle.
In order to break down barriers to action, we focus on building Innovation Cells instead. Innovation Cells are small independent entities fully staffed with top talent, with aggressive time and financial targets, but empowered to explore and create a viable solution or platform. Our approach emphasizes the sourcing of innovation – finding, adapting and integrating the best the world has to offer – rather than self-sufficient development. The key capability is often the ability to accelerate and integrate rather than invent.
We believe that successful innovation can be turned from craft (or black art) into a reliably deployable technology. To facilitate this we have created a pragmatic and comprehensive set of tools and checklists to help you cover all aspects of the innovation agenda without leaving white spaces or over-focusing on parts of the problem. All of this is designed to build innovation capability in the innovation cell in order to make the impact permanent.
We have helped create multi-billion dollar businesses working with Fortune 100 companies as well as built highly successful, innovative start-ups. We also walk the talk, which arguably makes us unique: We have created Zendegii Ltd. an innovative start-up, which has developed over a very short time frame a set of product and service platforms and industry changing IP in the health and nutrition sector. We use Zendegii as a living innovation cell, where your teams can learn, working alongside our experienced practitioners, to explore innovation techniques and gain confidence rapidly.
Our approach is fast, light-touch and generates immediate payback. A typical innovation kick-starter program takes no more than a quarter. As part of the approach to develop a substantial innovation, we always focus on enhancing and extending an existing product or service, which has the added benefit that the Innovation Cell usually pays for itself.