In a disruptive world, well-established, traditional companies often find it difficult to keep up with the younger, more dynamic new companies in terms of innovation. Especially when such innovations threaten their highly profitable core business.
In such situations, the following two strategies are usually favored:
- A defensive strategy, which aims to block the disruptive threat and optimize the performance of the threatened business units. This often leads to the company having to withdraw from these business segments at a later date or having to settle for a niche.
- A better option is the implementation of an offensive strategy aimed at attacking the company’s own core business itself or conquering the emerging new markets itself.
- More exciting, however, is to pursue the two options in parallel by protecting the core business while at the same time creating a new business segment or entering a new market. But that is challenging.
They know their way around the core business of the company. They have many years of experience, well-established processes, the right KPIs and well qualified employees. The routine is well-rehearsed and successful. How can you question your own product and even design something completely new, from which you can only remotely anticipate success? This is a high risk that one naturally does not like to tackle.
In addition, the company’s research and development department is very often responsible for innovation. Thus, in addition to the further development of existing products, a part of their resources is invested in innovative new projects. But are these employees free in their thoughts? Are the resources used in a targeted manner? Are the most promising projects pursued and are the “darlings” with little prospect of success stopped in time? And how can you ensure that disruptive ideas are not neglected right from the start? Do you wait with your judgment for the first fully functional prototype after you have already invested a lot of time and money?
A so-called external “Incubator as a Service” can help out of this dilemma. By not having the innovation activity take place in the successful, existing organization, international start-ups are included in the strategy in addition to your own ideas. Moreover, it is well known that many ideas are pursued that are technically appealing but then are not accepted by the market. With the methods Lean Startup and Design Thinking, market acceptance is in focus from the very beginning. According to the mot-to “fail fast, fail cheap”, you invest in those projects that make the breakthrough. You increase the success rate and reduce the innovation costs.
If it is your goal to develop disruptive and new business and innovation fields faster and if you want to ensure that your invested money achieves the greatest possible success, then an “Incubator as a Service” is the right step for your company. In this way you combine external and internal resources and gain access to effective measurement tools. You increase the speed and resource efficiency of your innovation projects.
What’s in for You?
If you feel like having the above described challenges the we should talk together about the potential that we work together. We are experienced in incubating companies with a complete out of the box view. Together with your insight knowledge we can do good for your future success..