Strategic innovation

Evolving innovative thinking by focusing on future users

Why strategic innovation

Innovation is a risky business

The idea phase not the most difficult that is the
commercialisation phase
Firms want to introduce innovations that the market
wants
Service firms have very little R&D and need to be
pull-oriented
They have the advantage of meeting the customers
Their innovation process becomes customer
oriented

What is strategic innovation ?

Innovation

is about what people may want in the

future
That is difficult to predict
Firms can not rely on actual user-demands on the
market they can not find lead users
Firms

are forced to choose a strategy:

Defensive: Try to guess what future users will want

Offensive: Try to determine what the future users will
want (influencing life style)

How is strategic innovation practiced?

It

is difficult to practice directly user-based

innovation:
Customers often have no ideas, particularly
not for radical innovations
Strategic innovation is the indirect way to
find what users may want in the future
Several methods
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User analyses

Market analyses
Examples: Surveys (how do people use web sites)
Trend spotters (new food habits)
Focus groups (social home service)
Anthropological approach
Examples: Living in youth groups (music, clothes,
everything) acting as a tourist
Critical incidences
Example: Interviews with victims of fire

User involvement

User communities
Examples: Web-blogs (software firms, library)
Help desk and complaints (travel agency)
User involvement in the innovation process
Examples: Co-creation (NewInsight)
The idea and test phases (New services for
mobile phones)
Value chain innovation (company-users as experts)
Examples: Diary wholesale cafe
Hotel - attraction tour operator press

Employee-based user-knowledge

Idea boxes
Examples: Library, IBM, Venture Cup
Empathic innovation
Examples: Waiters in a cafe
Insurance agents
Employees as innovators
Example: TrygVesta (insurance company)
Volunteers
Example: Roskilde festival

Offensive strategy

Creating behavioral trajectory

Example: Discount airlines
discount airport terminals
Experience added (influencing life style)
Examples: Cars web pages Levis jeans
Entrepreneurship create the movement oneself
Examples: Body Shop Windmill industry

Reflexive strategy
The

strategy must be regularly assessed (the

innovations may be wrong - the world is
changing)
Employees are involved (encounter ther
customers)
New push-based innovations may come up
(technology, R&D, intrapreneurship)
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Sum up

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Market or user based strategic innovation is about

incremental innovation
Strategic innovation is constant hard work
It is about business development and solving
problems/creating a better life call it innovation or
not
The methods must be developed and people trained
in using them.
Management must be committed and focused on
innovation and educated
e.g. Project When the customer encounters the
employee