Article contributed by Paul Hobcraft. The Art of Strategic Innovation Excerpts from an interview with Costas Markides, Professor of Strategic and International Management, London Business School.On defining what strategic innovation is:
On the radicalness of strategic innovation: The other element to the definition if strategic innovation is that it is a new positioning. Although there is no precise answer about the degree of “newness”, one can generally tell when a company starts playing the game in a fundamentally different way. On the question of “Who generally innovates?” On playing two totally different games: What are these conflicts that Porter talks about? My own position is that Porter is wrong in advising companies not to play two different games. I agree with him that playing two games is really difficult given all these conflicts, but not impossible. Conflicts can be managed! Over the past year, I have been studying companies that seem to be able to play two games at the same time. One generalization we can make at this stage is that these organizations have found ways to overcome these conflicts. How? For example, they minimize cannibalization by For example, look at VW and Audi, British Airways and Go, Midland and First Direct, Swatch and Omega. All these companies are playing more than one game but they have different names for their products. Physical separation of the units also contributes to a reduction of conflicts. On strategic and technological innovation: On how to innovate – strategically: One is to fundamentally question the existing mental models and the existing unquestioned assumptions of the organization. Every organization operates under certain mental models, paradigms, assumptions: these are our customers, this is how we sell and this is how we do business. My proposition is that an organization will never discover anything new unless it first questions what it already has and says: why are we doing it like this, could there be another way? As long as they are happy and satisfied with what they have, they are not going to search for something new – and will never discover anything new as a result. On why they don’t do it: On how to achieve positive crisis: At the end of this selling process you should find people who are enthusiastic, and On the four step process:
On the greatest obstacle to strategic innovation: |