Chapter Summary

_ Strategic planning in most companies is rarely an exercise in creating new and effective strategies for the future of the company, making it ineffective for strategy innovation.

_ Strategic planning is typically a highly analytical, quantitative process that focuses on corporate issues of today and today’s business model, extending out into the short-term future.

_ For effective strategy innovation, companies must create a new process, one that is creative, market-centric, heuristic (discoverydriven), and focused on the future.

_ A process of strategy innovation should be the ‘‘fuzzy front end’’ of an overall strategy creation process, leading seamlessly from opportunity identification and creation (strategy innovation) to opportunity evaluation and integration (strategic planning). Do strategy innovation and THEN do strategic planning.

Chapter 4

THE DI SCOVERY PROCESS

Our quest for discovery fuels our creativity in all fields, not just science. If we reached the end of the line, the human spirit would shrivel and die. But I don’t think we will ever stand still: we shall increase in complexity, if not in depth, and shall always be the center of an expanding horizon of possibilities.

—STEPHEN HAWKING

Do not outsource the strategy innovation process for your company! Regardless of how downsized, bogged-down, or downright busy your people are, they can find the time and energy to participate in a strategy innovation initiative. These initiatives are a welcome relief from employees’ day-to-day responsibilities because they are opportunities to view the business from a much different perspective. Your people get to see the big picture, they get to see longer-term, and they get to embrace a companywide, cross-functional perspective that is often lacking in their functional silo-based daily activities. It is also a chance to explore, speculate, and imagine new possibilities for the future. A strategy innovation initiative is frequently the type of activity that pulls together organizations by aligning people and departments to a common goal, a shared purpose.

Try a strategy innovation initiative with an internal, ad hoc group before thinking about building a more formalized system for strategy innovation. Experiment with it. Try different approaches, with different teams of people—either sequentially or simultaneously. Every initiative will provide valuable insights and ideas to your company, which will turn into economic benefits. Some initiatives will yield short-term, business-building innovations, and some initiatives will produce the breakthrough, market-creating innovations of the future. After getting an idea of how strategy innovation can work in your company, then you can think about building a more permanent, in-house capability for it.

To launch a strategy innovation initiative in your company, you will need some resources (people and funding) and a process. If you supply the resources, this book will supply the process.