Strategic Innovation with Babson Executive Education
Accelerate Your Future
As organizations mature, they become expert at efficiently and effectively delivering core products to current customers, and incrementally innovating within those product family offerings to protect and grow their market share and earnings. Eventually, the growth trajectory flattens. Companies that have aged several generations beyond their founding team, and have grown in complexity and size, face the quintessential dilemma of how to maintain the core business and, at the same time, protect their future health by creating the businesses of the future.
The latter requires envisioning major opportunity domains that are just beginning to emerge, where solutions seem complex and somewhat vague. Strategic Innovation is the organizational competency that operates to bring those visions to reality. We define it as the discipline that transforms creative discoveries and ideas into new platforms of business that bring significant value to the market, and therefore to the organization. But the context of Strategic Innovation, highly ambiguous and uncertain contexts, differs dramatically from that of the mainstream core business. The governance, culture, skills, resourcing, processes and metrics of the core business will stamp out these initiatives every time. Companies must, therefore, purposefully develop Strategic Innovation as an organizational capability.