Page 86 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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looked promising. By the time the technology was ready for mar-
ket, however, seven other companies had already introduced com-
peting products. By that time, the company’s product offered no
real differentiation. Failure to track business realities during devel-
opment led to an awful waste of company resources.
The Innovation Radar won’t solve this problem entirely, but
it will help you organize all of the business issues up front so
that your team can track changes in your assumptions as
development projects progress. Early on, corporate entrepre-
neurship teams should explore all 12 dimensions of their con-
cept’s potential business system, not only to uncover
innovative opportunities to enhance the business concept but
also to define the assumptions underlying each dimension and
track progress as their concepts develop.
When your objective is to build a new business, you’ll engage
in new business design whether you know it or not. You can
ignore business decisions until late in the process and default to
new product design, but it’s best to take a deliberate approach and
consider all aspects of how you serve the market: what you’re
offering, to whom, how you create and support it, and where you
connect with the marketplace. The Radar represents all of these
dimensions and provides a simple tool for helping corporate
entrepreneurs (and independent entrepreneurs, for that matter)
put all of the questions on the table up front, rather than stum-
bling on them later. Appendix A provides a guide with 31 ques-
tions to help you think more creatively about how you might
innovate around your business system. We’ll come back to the
application of these questions following the business design case.

Business Design Case: Kraft Foods, Inc.’s
Tassimo Hot Beverage System

Kraft’s introduction of Tassimo in 2004 reflects one exploration
of vectors outside the food industry’s traditional purview. The