Agile Thinking™
…for Growth and Innovation
A mindset and methodology to create breakthroughs and generate new revenue streams from R&D
– with speed and flexibility.
Learn how you can accelerate growth with our Agile Innovation Systems ™
Each company’s opportunities are unique. And so are the challenges with delivering innovation.
Our Agile Thinking approach blends key principles of Agile Innovation with clear, practical and road-tested generation and execution of breakthrough growth opportunities. Founded on understanding both the opportunity landscape and the unique value your organization can create, it gives you a method to infuse agility into the process of creating new opportunities and delivering them to market.
Agile Thinking is a new way of delivering growth and innovation to your organization. With roots in leading global corporations, it focuses on building the large company’s capability to innovate fast like a start-up. But because this concept needs to work differently in a large company environment, our approach blends lean start-up principles with the structure and execution model of a large company. Built on the concept of flexibility and adaptability, it presents a groundbreaking methodology that facilitates:
- Creating new opportunities with your base technology
- Generating new offerings by moving to adjacencies
- Building new business
- Identifying and acquiring new breakthrough technologies to open new opportunities
Innovate Better, Faster, and in New Ways
R&D is the most valuable asset of technology-based organizations. Today more than ever, R&D organizations are expected to not only deliver new and improved products in their existing domains, but to also identify growth opportunities in other rapidly evolving arenas.
To fulfill this mission and lead to breakthroughs, R&D organizations must find ways to think beyond the fixed traditional approaches to innovation. Businesses mature quickly, growth plateaus, and profits diminish. And it is no longer enough to continue forward in these long-established ways. Organizations find that they need to think outside of their traditional realm and to uncover new sources of growth.
To add to the challenge, they also need to innovate smarter and faster – adapting to the rapidly changing world economy and business conditions. Because organizations have an intellectual and physical assets base and a defined structure developed over a long time period as a strategic investment, it is a true challenge to change course and mobilize their teams to create breakthroughs with speed and agility.
So, is there a winning formula for creating breakthroughs? Can organizations learn this as a core competency? And can they do it in a way that complements rather than disrupts their operations?
Agile Thinking builds on principles that crystallized through our deep experience driving innovation in leading global corporations and across all innovation domains, our academic knowledge and by tapping the experience of the large network of peer companies. It is founded on a key premise– that regardless of the exact type of innovation challenge, the pillars of success are always – to define the opportunity space, to generate a powerful offering based on customer insights, to create a viable business model, and to build the vehicle to deliver the value. If you master how to do this and seek help from partners to add expertise specific to your situation, you will have mastered how to innovate and create breakthroughs.
On the surface, this may sound over-simplified or not exactly new. but there is much more complexity under the hood. It is the art and science of design and execution of these steps in the context of a given innovation challenge that allows winning teams to create breakthroughs. It is science because logic and tools always apply. And it is art because how you mix and adapt the techniques is rarely the same, just like the challenges you solve and the outcomes you create.
We know this because of our own quest for a formula to create breakthroughs. We sought ideas by connecting with customers and partners around the globe, identifying breakthrough technologies and investment opportunities, and working through the barriers of adopting new technology. We have learned from failures and succeeded in laying foundations of new businesses, turning our efforts into a best in-class innovation venturing program.
From this experience, we can articulate a formula to create breakthroughs. And this is exactly how our Agile Thinking approach was born.
How Does Our Agile Thinking Work?
Agile Thinking brings together the key building blocks of creating breakthroughs – understanding the opportunity landscape, creating an offering, defining the business model, and delivering and monetizing the value. So how do you infuse this capability into your teams to quickly mobilize your organization for growth? You do it with Agile Innovation Systems (AIS)–it builds the flexible structures that can operate within and as an addition to your traditional processes. Built on principles of a lean start-up in large organization, it creates the exact road maps and gives your team the tools and knowledge to address the innovation challenge at hand.
The key components of the AIS are:
- Team-based structures mobilize the resources and focus on the innovation challenge;
- Executive governance and decision making frameworks keep efforts moving forward;
- Modular capabilities create the foundation for solving problems and creating breakthroughs. The key fundamentals are – defining opportunity space from market and technology landscapes, building value proposition from deep customer insights, designing and validating a sustainable business model, quantifying the value, and building pathways to deliver it.
How Our Agile Thinking Can Help You
The system is founded on building the capability to understand the opportunity landscape and the unique value your organization can create with its technology and business competencies. Agile Thinking can help you to:
- Create new opportunities with your base technology
- Generate new offerings by moving to adjacencies
- Build new business
- Identify and acquire new breakthrough technologies to open new opportunities
- Generate revenue streams from your intellectual property
KEY PRINCIPLES OF AGILE THINKING
An underlying and fundamental assumption of our Agile Thinking is that all companies can have access to the same information about the changing world, economy, and technology. The key to creating breakthroughs is in the ability to gather and use this information to generate insights about opportunities and to combine them with YOUR assets in a way that creates unique and powerful value for customers.
This fundamental understanding is embedded in the main principles of Agile Thinking:
Seek opportunity in solving customer challenges…in new ways. Both from within and from outside.
Think and act flexibly –mobilize your limited resources to create breakthroughs.
Reframe your capabilities – harness strengths of your organization, your customers and your partners .
Create synergy between R&D and Marketing.
Become comfortable with uncertainty – learn fast, hedge risk.
Internalize cutting edge innovation practices through adaptation (A2 – Adopt through Adaptation).
OPPORTUNITY CREATION
AGILE INNOVATION SYSTEMS ™
…Blueprint for Execution
- Built on a flexible “virtual teams” concept
- Delivers agile and innovative processes
- Focuses on collaboration
Efficiently delivering growth within existing organization structure