Capitalizing on new ideas requires an innovation strategy that is aligned with business priorities yet flexible enough to adapt to changing market conditions. BCG’s innovation consulting experts help clients build an innovation engine that can succeed today and in the future.
Innovation is hard. Only about 30% of companies think they are good at it. And it’s only getting more challenging. Even the strongest innovators are required to continually master new capabilities and develop faster and more agile research and development processes.
Avoiding the pitfalls of innovation calls for an approach that is strategy-led, biased toward action, and agile. These characteristics are true whether you’re talking about innovation in consumer products or in a business-to-business domain—or innovating at the level of the product, service, or business model. And they’re at the heart of BCG’s approach to innovation consulting. BCG’s innovation journey is a holistic approach in which we collaborate closely with the client to strengthen its innovation system and make innovation happen. The approach has four central elements:
We begin by looking both outside and inside to define an innovation strategy that best supports the overall business strategy. Outside to understand key trends shaping customer economics and demand and to prioritize the most attractive domains for innovation investment. And inside to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the client’s innovation system. The strategy enables the innovation system to gain traction by pinpointing the most important areas for investment.
A great innovation strategy is necessary but not sufficient. Creating value in a world of shortening product and business model life cycles requires decisive action—and speed. We work with clients in a sprint-based approach to develop and launch minimum viable products consistent with the strategy. Offerings are evolved in this “test and learn” approach—and the less successful ones are dropped to free up resources for other projects.
Maximizing the return on innovation investments requires the ability to find product-market fit and scale the most promising projects fast. We work closely with clients to help them make the transition from experimentation to execution of a new product, service, or business model.
Increasingly, innovation success calls for the ability to continually build new innovation muscles—or to bring in new skills and capabilities from outside. We help organizations identify the critical capabilities needed and define the best path to obtain them, whether through corporate venturing, partnership, acquisition, or internal development.
We helped a semiconductor equipment company capitalize on an unexpected opportunity to enter an adjacent health care space; the move generated a third of the company’s revenue in the first five years and quadruple its valuation.
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BCG helped a technology company to transform their R&D portfolio, which freed up 25% of low-return R&D spending, allowing the company to expand into new capabilities, markets, and clients.
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