Beschrijving

The heart of a company’s business model should be game-changing innovation. This is not just the invention of new products and services, but the ability to systematically convert ideas into new offerings that alter the very context of the business. As they lead to repeat purchases, these offerings reshape the market, so that the company is playing an entirely new (and profitable) game to which others must adapt. A number of game-changing innovators are operating today, including such household-name enterprises as Procter & Gamble, Nokia, the Lego Group, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, DuPont, and General Electric. Wherever you see a steady flow of noteworthy innovations from one company, you can probably assume that it is a game-changing innovator, with the distinctive kinds of social connections, culture, and supporting behaviors that enable it to play that role. Consider the case of Procter & Gamble Company. Since A.G. Lafley became chief executive officer in 2000, the leaders of P&G have worked hard to make innovation part of the daily routine and to establish an innovation culture. Lafley and his team preserved the essential part of P&G’s research and development capability — world-class technologists who are masters of the core technologies critical to the household and personal-care businesses — while also bringing more P&G employees outside R&D into the innovation game. They sought to create an enterprise-wide social system that would harness the skills and insights of people throughout the company and give them one common focus: the consumer. Without that kind of culture of innovation, a strategy of sustainable organic growth is far more difficult to achieve.