Acting like a venture capitalist is now essential for innovation and staying competitive – we help you be on the cutting edge.

The challenge: the secret sauce is no longer secret

The accelerating pace of digitization and information sharing – both legal and illegal – means there are few secrets left. Online sources and reverse engineering means nothing is safe. For most new products and services, competitors can develop alternatives within a few weeks or months. They work around or ignore patents. And they add new features and bring better bundles to market.

The solution: relentless innovation

We show you how to adopt the best practices of incubators and venture capitalists to make innovation a main pillar of your strategy.

Historical approaches to corporate innovation are still largely in play. Partnerships, traditional mergers and acquisitions, and internal research and development all contribute to driving a firm forward.

But most firms now need to supplement and integrate historical and internal approaches with those of technology startups. Simply put, corporations must act like venture capitalists by directing funds towards promising new technologies or services through standard VC techniques. And they must select their investments based on the pace of innovation within the industry and the likelihood of industry disruption.

Innovation stems from the right foundation

We help you get the balance right for technology investments. We use a rigorous assessment to help you and your firm choose the right areas and the right approaches for driving innovation. As part of our four-stage framework, we:

Asses your firm and industry: We do a critical examination of your internal and external capabilities, benchmarking them against cross-industry averages and comparable firms. We analyze your industry, its pace of innovation and disruption from other industries, the business areas most vulnerable to disruption, and attractive growth opportunities.

Define strategic objectives: Based on the assessment, we help you identify and focus objectives for internal innovation and external venturing vehicles. We also research local and international markets to identify potential external vehicles for investment.

Help set up an operating model: Working closely with your finance team and innovation stakeholders, we help you set up governance structures that differentiate yet connect innovation vehicles to the core business and larger strategic objectives. We help you establish operating models that link innovation initiatives and venturing vehicles, and which name the essential capabilities needed for each. Finally, we assist you in creating risk tolerance levels as a safety valve against any given innovation vehicle.

Name key measures for monitoring success: We utilize our Strategy Execution Management process to cascade a balanced scorecard for every investment and innovation vehicle. (For more on the Strategy Execution Management, visit our SEM page.) We give each a clear destination statement and strategy map for achieving the end goal. Strategic objectives are translated into sets of relevant measures for individual vehicles and for the overall innovation and corporate venturing program. Finally, we help you monitor the progress of your innovation programs.