Strategic innovation navigation system for growth innovation

Abstract

Overview: The global economic environment is becoming ever more competitive and corporations have a harder time to secure growth or even survival. Many corporations still do not implement “Strategic Innovation Management” due to a lack of fundamental knowledge, “Shareholder Capitalism” to deliver on highly anticipated TSR (Total Shareholder Return) percentages as a top priority for the corporation (and thus focus primarily on short-term low-risk incremental innovation which became “ideation” innovation programs) or financial limited budgetary reasons to rather invest in operations or shareholder dividends. There is of course an enormous hype about innovation and innovation management, but due to various academic and social reasons it is still not yet completely well accepted as a corporate function. Challenge: The challenge is that 94% of corporations are still dissatisfied with their innovation performance, even though the concept of modern innovation is almost 100 years old. Very few companies are successful to consistently and sustainably create value for customers and consumer, wealth for employees and growth for shareholders. This will be referred to as the “Corporate Innovation Performance Challenge”. Vision: In order to solve the “Corporate Innovation Performance Challenge” and to support sustainable corporate growth (will be referred to as “Growth Innovation”), the vision was to develop a “paradigm shifting” novel system for corporate executives that will simplify the understanding, development, management and implementation of “Strategic Corporate Innovation”. Method: This research took a Systems Thinking (Forrester, 1995) (Meadows and Wright, 2008) approach in combination with Systems Engineering (Bahill and Gissing, 1998a) principles. An intensive literature research study (especially for empirical data) was undertaken to understand the social and economic reasons (or forces) why corporate executives are not satisfied with the performance of their corporate innovation programs. Only after the core of the problem had been well defined, could the research advance to investigate all possible frameworks, models and theories from a wide range of subject areas to collect insights and to synthesize (design, develop and analyze) new systems models. Solution: Following Figure 1, the “Strategic Corporate Innovation Navigation (SCINav) Systems Model” is a Dynamic Multidimensional Contextual Based Corporate Innovation Strategy Formulation System modelled as a Relational Multidimensional Vector of Matrixes, to function as a guide for corporate executives when they need to develop innovation strategies. Outcome: For this PhD thesis the Strategic Corporate Innovation Navigation (SCINav) Systems Model (as in Figure 1) will be the deliverable “product”.