GELLIFY, a global innovation factory that blends strategy, design, and technology to assist organizations’ growth from vision to execution in the “purple method,” has published ground-breaking research on venture-building titled “9 TYPES OF CORPORATE INNOVATION VEHICLES: HOW TO DRIVE INNOVATION.”
Innovation practitioners are conversant with terms like as innovation laboratories, R&D centers, corporate venture capital, venture builders, and so on. Although they all operate in various ways, they all have one thing in common: they are all organizational structures designed to drive creativity. However, the “innovation vocabulary” is still missing a word that encompasses all of these concepts. GELLIFY wants to alter that by making the word “innovation vehicles” more common.
The recently released paper also compares the venture-building and innovation landscapes of the 1990s and now, demonstrating how corporates’ heritage approach to innovation functioned in stable circumstances vs what sorts of “innovation vehicles” are required for corporates to survive today.
According to Statista, the average lifespan of S&P 500 companies in the 1980s was more than 40 years, which meant less pressure to innovate and traditional methods of innovation – in what GELLIFY classified as four – “old school vehicles” typically comprised of M&As, joint ventures, R&D/tech labs, and internal innovation (processes & tools) – were sufficient to keep up with the competition.
While corporations today operate and adapt to markets with low entry barriers, rapidly changing technologies, and increased customer power, they also need to adopt faster and more agile ways to innovate, through what GELLIFY refers to as ‘modern innovation’ vehicles, to avoid being disrupted, especially since the average age of a company listed on the S&P 500 has now fallen to less than twenty years.
“20 years ago, innovation was mainly an R&D game in scientific fields, businesses were changing by a very rational re-engineering process, often driven by the intent to adopt existing best practices in years’ time. Today, innovation is a creative exercise that has become a continuous process of inventing new ways of working and disruptive business models, to beat the competitors, in months!” – says Massimo Cannizzo, CEO & Co-Founder at GELLIFY Middle East.
This may be accomplished by establishing “new” innovation vehicles, which GELLIFY defines as “organizational entities that manage and execute various forms of innovation with purpose and structure,” because the old vehicles already have a more defined structure, but the new ones do not usually. This will enable for more focused, unambiguous, repeatable, and quantifiable organizational innovation.
Each innovation vehicle is a permanent entity (not a project or task force) with a specified set of objectives, a dedicated crew, funding, and so on. An innovation vehicle goes through a process in which each attribute of the vehicle is carefully constructed based on numerous aspects such as resources, current culture, and business objectives. These businesses can be more or less linked to the primary business ‘mothership’ in terms of culture, geographical location, finance, legal structure, and so on.
Without a well-defined innovation vehicle, a corporate entity risks falling victim to the four innovation sins and the ‘innovation theater,’ namely, a lack of structure, a lack of strategy and purpose, poor execution, and a lack of innovation culture.
Most significantly, we must remember that business innovation is a journey. The company’s destination, goals, path, pace, background, and so on may all recommend various vehicles for different journeys. Building and launching a vehicle rapidly and developing it over time is the appropriate strategy to success.
9 TYPES OF CORPORATE INNOVATION VEHICLES: HOW TO DRIVE INNOVATION – The complete report providing an in-depth understanding of how to manage and execute different types of innovation with purpose and structure can be downloaded here.