Build Innovation Capabilities

When growth stalls, it can set off a devastating chain reaction. Company assets go underutilized, jobs are eliminated, competitors diffuse talent, and capital markets react. Management is forced to fight day-to-day fires rather than focus on innovation and growth.

Innosight helps companies overcome growth challenges by building an infrastructure for innovation.  Our work with Procter & Gamble points to the possibilities. Faced with shrinking product lifecycles and tougher global competition, the consumer products leader partnered with Innosight to help implement a "new growth factory."  

By systematizing innovation and aligning all efforts with its long-term vision of creating "purposeful" products that improve lives, P&G tripled its new product success rate. From 2000 to 2010, revenue doubled, from $40 to $80 billion, and net income quadrupled.  (Download our Harvard Business Review article "How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate").

Our experience with P&G—as well as companies like Citi and Syngenta—shows that companies need to put the right systems and structures in place to transform how innovation happens. While creating new products and services seems complex and unpredictable, companies that organize to innovate can grow more reliably and repeatedly.

Innosight's innovation capabilities framework is featured in our new Harvard Business Review Press e-book Building a Growth Factory.

The framework is based around four components:

 1. A growth blueprint that details the types of innovation you are pursuing, along with goals and guidelines for getting there.

2. Production systems that transform the raw materials of innovation—ideas—into tangible new products and services.

3. Governance and controls that enable the management structure to scale innovations to deliver impact and growth.

4. Leadership, talent, and culture that feature the right people, in the right roles, doing and saying the right things.

A company's culture can be a critical barrier or a true enabler to innovation—as a company's rules and norms govern the hundreds of daily decisions that senior managers never get to make. We've seen how culture can change over time, but only if management aligns organizational structures with innovation capabilities.

Our work with Citi shows how this can be accomplished.  The global financial company was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis when it partnered with Innosight.

The CEO appointed a chief innovation officer and the creation of a new team, Citi Ventures, which operates in close partnership with some of Citi's most innovative business units and leaders.

Custom workshops designed for Citi established a common language around innovation and disruption as well as a baseline understanding of tools and techniques to achieve growth. Global teams put in place an innovation system that Citi has scaled across the enterprise.

The result has been an explosion of new products and services that are setting the stage for the next wave of growth for the 200-year-old financial services company.

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What We Offer

Innovation Capabilities Assessment

We work with leadership teams to assess innovation performance, diagnose organizational roadblocks, measure current efforts versus best practices, and develop a roadmap for new growth.