Alex Osterwalder, CEO of Strategyzer, and Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challenger’s author, admonished the Metronome’s Tip Top Business Summit 2023 attendees that a goal to innovate isn’t going to make you an innovative company. Only when you have a system to innovate, to continuously explore, validate, and produce innovations will you make yourself an invincible company like 3M or Bosch.
Creativity is not important to innovation. Finding great evidence is where you need creativity. Process and persistence are more important than creativity for innovation.
Osterwalder believes 3 elements build an Invincible Company.
An Invincible Company:
Business Challenge – EXPLOITATION OR EXPLORATION
Osterwalder sees the biggest challenge for existing companies is choosing between exploration and exploitation.
There’s a reason why companies invest more time and energy into exploitation than exploration. And yet while exploitation provides more certainty, each company needs to determine when to invest in exploring. While many explorations fail, they are where your greatest returns can come for the future.
This is why Osterwalder recommends leadership invest 40% of their time exploring the future.
The Danger in Spreadsheets
When your business focuses on exploration, Osterwalder exhorts leaders to be evidence-based. He called spreadsheets to support any decision as “fantasy made explicit!” Spreadsheets are projections, forecasts not based on any evidence. Leaders should focus on evidence that supports the idea. The leader needs to be actively and visibly involved with innovation. Never ask for opinions, ask for facts. Ask questions like, “When was the last time… or Tell me about a time when you…”
You need a system to identify successes, and even then, 9 out of 10 innovations will end up as failures.
Ideas are cheap. It’s important to experiment, asking yourself “What needs to be true for this to work?”
If your business has over 25 people, one person should be dedicated to innovation to build an invincible company.
An invincible company is led by a leader who asks for evidence. Yet committed to creating an environment to support innovation and a system that will identify winning ideas and in which winning teams flourish!
To learn more about Alex Osterwalder watch Business Model Canvas 2:20 video:
To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.
Growth demands Strategic Discipline.
Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.
A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms. Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.
Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.
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