Building a Sustainable Innovation Engine: The DNA of Winning Companies
How do you repeatedly create something of value that your company can use? It’s easy to follow the crowd, but you want more than that. You’re not here to play it safe, to blend in with the competition, to be yet another face in the corporate herd. You want to chart a course that allows you to differentiate—to create something new and valuable that others haven’t even dreamed of yet.
For an organization to be truly innovative, it must master three essential capabilities, or what you can think of as the "Innovation DNA": The ability to Discover, Incubate, and Accelerate. These three components are the lifeblood of any enterprise that aims to lead, rather than follow, in its industry. Let’s unpack each of them.
Discover: Finding the Gems
Discovery is all about peeking around the undiscovered corners of today. You’re looking for new ideas, and often those are incremental advancements you can quickly bring to market in Horizon 1—the next 12 months or so. Whether the innovation is incremental and low-hanging fruit or radical innovation that will take more time to understand, this is the unique process when you listen closely to the market, discerning the unspoken desires of your customers.
A word about your innovation ambition: Your strategy may be to find incremental innovations. Eighty percent of the time, companies benefit from uncovering these small but significant improvements to products and services that customers are already clamoring for. Discovery also can uncover moonshots that take longer to bring to life, but open so many more possibilities. Regardless, Discovery is about listening to the voice of the customer and delivering what they want, faster and better.
Incubate: Turning Ideas into Realities
Incubation is the bridge between a good idea and a feasible product. It’s where you take a promising concept and de-risk it. Here, you dig deep to uncover the critical assumptions that underpin your idea. What must be true for this to work in the real world? What could go wrong? You then systematically verify these assumptions, addressing potential pitfalls before they become roadblocks.
Incubation is your test lab. It’s where you prove the viability of your ideas, turning hunches into hypotheses and hypotheses into solid plans. It’s not glamorous, but it’s crucial. It’s where ideas grow up, or wither away.
Accelerate: Bringing It All to Market
And then there’s acceleration. This is where the rubber meets the road. You’ve discovered a need, incubated an idea, and now you have something shiny, something promising. But does it hold up in the harsh light of the marketplace? Acceleration is all about scaling. It’s your go-to-market strategy. You’re testing whether the broader market will embrace your innovation and do so at a scale that justifies your investment.
This is where you identify the fastest path to market. Do you leverage existing channels, or build new ones? Do you use your own salesforce, or do you partner with others? It’s all about finding the most efficient way to turn your innovation into a market-dominating force.
Watch more on the Growth Innovation Strategy YouTube channel:
The Risks of Innovation: Look Before You Leap
Of course, the entire process is fraught with risk. Innovation isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to examine all your critical uncertainties involving Desirability, technical Feasibility, and economic Viability because the dangers to your innovation idea aren’t always obvious. But once you’ve done your due diligence—once you’re sure the road ahead is clear—don’t hesitate. Go. Move fast and take everything with you. Seize the market. Dominate the customer segments you want to own. Invest heavily in marketing and sales to create the critical mass you need to make your innovation stick.
Managing the DNA Across Three Horizons
To sustain your Innovation DNA over time, you need to think in three horizons:
Horizon 1: What can we do right now, and over the next 12 months, to bring incremental innovations to market and start earning money immediately?
Horizon 2: How do we extend our products into new markets or adjacent spaces over the next 12 to 36 months?
Horizon 3: What’s the long-term game plan? How do we innovate our value chain, our processes, our very way of doing business over the next three years and beyond?
This requires a robust approach to portfolio management. Just like any project management, it involves setting priorities, allocating resources, and making tough decisions. And above all that, you need governance—a structure where stakeholders are actively engaged, aligned with your strategic goals, and willing to invest in the success of your innovation initiatives.
The Sustainable Innovation Engine
In the end, building a sustainable innovation engine isn’t about occasional flashes of brilliance. It’s about creating a disciplined process that allows you to discover, incubate, and accelerate new ideas consistently. It’s about sustaining your Innovation DNA across different horizons, so you’re always ready to delight customers, create value, and, ultimately, lead your market.
Because following the crowd? That’s easy. But blazing your own trail? That’s what creates a legacy. That’s what makes you irreplaceable. And that’s the DNA of a winning organization.
Want to Learn More?
If you're inspired by the idea of building a sustainable innovation engine, there's more to discover in the book Grabbing Lightning. This insightful (academic) resource explores how twelve leading companies broke free from the constraints of traditional management systems to foster breakthrough innovation. It reveals the unique building blocks that can transform your organization into a hub of innovation.
The authors, experts in the field, break down Discovery, Incubation, and Acceleration and show how each one plays a critical role in creating a culture that values and sustains innovation. You'll learn why mistakes and failures are not just inevitable, but necessary for real breakthroughs, and how to leverage them to your advantage.
Grabbing Lightning also tackles the real-world challenges you’ll face as you try to integrate innovation into the fabric of your organization, offering practical advice to make it a sustainable business function.
Want to bring it to life in your organization? Reach out to us: innovation@growthinnovationstrategy.com.
— GIS
