Innovation Strategy and Delivery

Our Approach to the Innovation Journey

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:

1. Innovation strategy. We begin by looking both outside and inside to define an innovation strategy model 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.
2. Innovation Sprints. 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 innovation strategy model. Offerings are evolved in this “test and learn” approach—and the less successful ones are dropped to free up resources for other projects.
3. Business and scale-up. 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.
4. Innovation Enablement. 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.