An article in the April Harvard Business Review reports an analysis that companies that have 30% of their innovation portfolio focused outside their core business produce better long-term business results.
Of this 30% there are two major focus areas. The first focus area is plans to enter new categories and/or adjacencies. Successfully entering new segments requires having a product that is clearly to dramatically better than the best product in the segment today. The second focus area is transformational ideas. These can be new categories or entirely new to the world ideas.
Make no mistake about it, keeping the core business strong and vital is critical to an enterprise’s long-term success.
But when the company focuses only on that, it encounters serious risk. This article reports research supporting our point of view that portfolio diversity of the kind described here is critical to outperforming your peers.
This is also one of the most challenging types of innovation from multiple dimensions. It requires bigger, out-of-the-box thinking which most companies are not skilled at. In many ways Innovate2Grow Experts/i2Ge specializes in this because of our very high-powered inventing process that consistently delivers ideas that are dramatically better and transformational.
Even when companies have these kinds of ideas, company culture can be toxic to them. Developing ideas like this into marketplace successes often requires new organizational capabilities. Sometimes partnering with external resources can help to maintain the vitality of the original ideas.