Page 83 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

70 grow from within

system. If new ideas conform, they are more likely to be acted
upon. If they don’t, they are more likely to be passed by, even
if they make financial and strategic sense for the company.
We propose that all new products or services should be
approached as new business design challenges. This needn’t be
an expensive or time-consuming proposition. In cases where a
new product fits neatly into the company’s established ways
of operating, the business design challenge becomes simple:
just design the product and take it to market as you would any-
thing else. But even in such a case, we propose that develop-
ment teams pose comprehensive business design questions up
front, in order to bring to the surface unquestioned assump-
tions that might no longer be true. In cases such as the Tellabs
Titan 6500, new business design rather than just new product
development would have made a significant difference.
Part of the problem is that most firms take a narrow view of
what it means to innovate. Not only do they leave a lot of oppor-
tunities on the table, but their limited vision can compromise the
success of otherwise great products. For most companies, their
innovation focus areas evolve as a result of history (“This is what
we’ve always innovated on”) or by industry or market conven-
tion (“This is how everyone innovates”). While we like to think
that managers consider and invest in the best opportunities, they
often invest in what fits into their existing vision of the world,
and what the company can most easily act on.
In November of 2005, two Fortune 200 U.S. food companies
approached us to create their Innovation Radar profiles. Neither
knew that the other was contacting us. Some 20 to 30 top exec-
utives from each company completed the 120-question Radar
Survey relative only to their own company. The results are
shown in Figure 2-2. Note that the resulting profiles are nearly
the same, with only minor variations. Statistically, they are
exactly the same. Consider this again: two different management