Innovation Strategies from 6 Leading Innovation Firms
You may remember our blog post from a few months back where we identified the top firms driving innovation. We now want to go one step further and uncover the top strategies from each of these consultancies.
These leading corporate innovation consulting firms are providing compelling solutions and have significant track records. They were evaluated and selected based on their reputable corporate clients, unique methodology, and solutions-based outcomes. Now, let’s delve into each individual ‘secret sauce’…
How Top Corporate Innovation Consulting Firms are Thinking About Innovation Methodology
Innosight
Innosight uses “dual transformation,” a principle that enables companies to reposition their current business whilst creating their future. Brought about in-house by Scott D. Anthony, Clark Gilbert, and Mark W. Johnson, the methodology covers two major themes: the steps to take and what leaders need.
1. The steps (as easy as A, B, C):
- Transformation A — Reposition today’s business to maximize its resilience.
- Transformation B — Create tomorrow’s growth engine
- Capabilities Link — Use unique skills and resources that give you the advantage to bring A and B together.
2. To support transformation, leaders need 4 things to enable dual transformation:
- The courage to choose — Explore the fact that once the disruption is clear, it’s often too late to do anything about it. Leaders must choose a new path before convincing data is presented.
- The clarity to focus — Bring clarity to today’s strategic choices (what to do and what not to do) by using a “future back” mindset (ask what the future will look like and how we will get there). Invest to own the future, rather than be disrupted by it.
- The curiosity to explore — Boost the company’s ‘curiosity quotient’ by creating safe spaces for exploration, exposing leadership to new stimuli, and incorporating curiosity in day-to-day routines
- The conviction to persevere — Transformation is the toughest challenge a leader will face hitting 3 key crises: commitment, conflict, and identity. Leaders should prepare for these crises by repeating the mantra, “A does A, B does B,” to emphasize that they are both repositioning for today and creating tomorrow.
To learn more about Dual Transformation, read the mini-book here.
etventure
EY and etventure are in partnership to shape the future of consulting. Instead of focusing on external innovation or partnering with startups to enhance their businesses over internal innovation, etventure is unique in that they do both. They provide a “Seed Labs” service for companies that want to build innovative products and services internally. They also provide access to over 5,000 potential startup partners for external innovation efforts.
Additionally, they have a proven process that brings together clients’ existing business and new digital business. They identify and utilize current focuses while inviting the client to envision the future:
Fahrenheit 212
Fahrenheit 212 is outcome-driven — this was exemplified in their initial strategy of employee compensation being entirely performance-based. Wow! Although this strategy has evolved, it is believed that this mindset has bred its culture to approach every business like it’s their own, which is at the core of their business model.
Their method, F-212, uses a combination of two concepts: strategy of forward play and the blue sky concept, each trialed individually in the past by many but unsuccessful without the other to lean on. They also emphasize business acumen and consumer empathy, or ‘money and magic’ in shorthand — bringing both opportunities together under one banner.
Jump Associates
Jump Associates helps companies define new growth strategies with big ideas and robust financial plans whilst helping to test, refine, and launch new businesses. They conduct qualitative and quantitative customer research to strategically align teams to move with agility.
Jump has a hybrid approach to design thinking and management consulting. Their design thinking is rooted in a core principle: empathy. They map out potential opportunities by prioritizing values and goals, which gets people, to put it simply, to care. When managing consulting projects, Jump focuses on the delivery; they work with clients from the ideation phase right through to piloting.
Plug & Play
Plug and Play Tech Center is both a startup accelerator and a corporate innovation platform. They run 50 accelerator programs per year with a focus on deal-flow for their 200+ corporate partners. What gives Plug and Play a great advantage is that by working with such a large number of both corporates and startups, they can frequently glimpse what’s on the horizon giving key insight into current trends across multiple industries!
Take a glimpse at Plug and Play’s famous tech summit:
RocketSpace
After working with hundreds of corporates and startups via their tech campuses, accelerator programs, and corporate innovation services, RocketSpace has defined a process which ensures not only innovation but tangible, revenue-generating results. Recent highlights include Griffith Foods investing $2.5MM in ReGrained to expand their product portfolio through the Terra Accelerator as well as BP investing $5MM into Freewire Technologies to deploy mobile fast charging to its fuel stations across Europe through the Mobility Tech Collaborative.
When working one-on-one with a corporate client, RocketSpace takes pride in digging deep to understand and assess a client’s wants, needs, and gaps within innovation. Working with AB InBev, RocketSpace understood the company’s need to track spend, impact, and data for their 15,000 annual events. RocketSpace leveraged their extensive connections and expertise in the startup ecosystem to find an emerging company that built a custom events management platform and integrated it with AB InBev’s sales database resulting in a 9% account sales increase and doubled events investment to drive ROI. The seasoned group of consultants approaches each project with the mindset of being an extension of the client, engaging weekly, and, in some cases, daily with corporate clients sitting on campuses, to fully bring them on their innovation journey, teaching as they go.
The methodology, of which each package can standalone, is:
- Landscape Exploration — analysis of multiple industries to determine innovation opportunities
- Discovery — deep dive into new technologies sourced from a global network to solve for innovation initiatives
- Concept Design — approach a single opportunity or problem area and discover multiple applicable solutions
- Solution Design — transform an innovation concept into an actionable solution
- Component Test — test and optimize actionable solutions through proof of concepts
- Integration Test — elevate and optimize proof of concepts into market testing to integrate within the business
Grow Your Innovation Initiatives
There are a variety of strategies and structures for incorporating innovation into a company. It is important to evaluate the structure of your company and what kind of innovation methodology you need to be successful before determining the right company to help you scale your innovation efforts. An easy first step is to take the Innovation Maturity Assessment to understand how your company ranks and what external innovation partners would best accelerate your efforts.
