Page 85 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

72 grow from within

teams at two different multibillion-dollar companies in the same
industry have exactly the same Innovation Radar profiles.
When presented with the evidence, a senior R&D executive
at one of the companies remarked, “I knew this was true. Now
I actually see it. . . . How depressing.” While most companies
aren’t quite as much in sync with their competitors as in this
case, we do see an impressive amount of “me too” innovation,
especially when we expand our vision to the business system
rather than simply to products or services. Naturally, indus-
tries evolve to similarity for a variety of reasons, both good and
bad. Companies that end up leading change within their
industries are often those that change the basis of competition,
not just through products but through a radical reconsidera-
tion of accepted aspects of their business system.
Corporate entrepreneurs face particularly tough business
design challenges. Developing a new stand-alone product can
be much easier than changing a company’s supply chain or the
way its customers pay. However, if business design were easy,
there wouldn’t be any money in it. The good news is that the
discipline of business design allows new business teams to
pose the right questions up front, determine whether business
system changes are feasible, test new concepts in advance, and
design their offerings accordingly.
More often than not, development teams focus on the product
or technology, and business-related decisions like channel strategy
and supply chain issues surface much later. Not only can business
issues be more expensive to solve as a product nears the market-
place—after significant resources have been spent to develop the
product—but product decisions that were made early on might
severely restrict the business options that are available later. Fail-
ing to keep the business issues front and center throughout the
development process can be costly, and keeping them there need
not be complex. A major pharmaceutical company worked for
years to develop a new beta-blocker. At the beginning, the concept