The Entrepreneur Within E-Book

Mark Roberts

• Herausgeber: Unicorn
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 268

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Entrepreneur Within is an innovator's playbook to help ideas gain traction, scale quickly and keep an entrepreneurial mindset alive within any organisation. Large companies often lose the creative spark that brought them success and get weighed down by the complex systems built up within them. Start-up companies often get bloated with too many disparate ideas and get blocked by a lack of basic systems and infrastructure. The proprietary FORGE® Methodology shows how businesses of all stages and sizes can develop creative and viable innovation that makes a difference.

Leseprobe

123

THEENTREPRENEUR WITHIN

How to FORGE innovation-led growth by embracing the inner entrepreneur

MARK ROBERTS

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEFOREWORD Dave Foreman Managing Partner, Praetura Ventures.INTRODUCTIONIs this book for you?How to use this bookThe true reason for this bookPART ONE: GROWING PAINS Pushing through those awkward teenage years.THE INNOVATION PARADOXHow growth stifles creativity, and what to do about it.BECOMING AMBIDEXTROUSThe magic of ‘and’– why you need to be innovative and efficient.PART TWO: THE FORGE METHODOLOGYHow to use FORGE.FOCUSFinding the right problem for you.ORIGINALITYStanding out through creativity.RESULTSGetting real-world validation.GROWTHScaling up for success.ECOSYSTEMThe friends you need.FORGE YOUR OWN PATHFurther ResourcesEndnotesAcknowledgementsIndexCopyright

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FOREWORD

DAVE FOREMAN

MANAGING PARTNER, PRAETURA VENTURES

AS A VC, WE SPEND OUR DAYS searching for the best ideas. Ideas that make our lives easier, faster, greener, cheaper or better in some way. In a world where the rate of change is ever increasing, our ability to form and execute new ideas is the only true source of competitive advantage.

And many start-ups threaten established businesses because companies lose their ability to innovate as they grow. Simultaneously, start-ups often fail because they cannot scale. The venture ecosystem exists because of our collective failure to ‘think’ en masse.

Recent history is filled with incumbents suffering from stagnant thought. Mocked in business headlines, their collapses are often viewed as gross oversight. The industry shames those unable to see threats to their hard-earned monopolies. Yet these issues repeat time and time again; because being innovative is hard.

Through decades of finding and backing exceptional founders and helping them build great businesses, Praetura has learnt that a team’s ability to continuously innovate through problems will ultimately decide whether they survive or thrive. Whilst this may seem obvious, an innovation-led approach requires discipline and must be prioritised. Few leaders can truly maintain this over time. For every new hire, you must work even harder to give them room to innovate. To kickstart UK productivity and create more globally consequential companies, we must improve our ability to create, package and ship new ideas at scale. 7

Leaders have long searched for structures that maximise productivity, often with limited success. Research shows autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive motivation. We have found that if an organisation truly embraces an innovation-led approach, another unexpected benefit surfaces. By raising the bar and challenging staff to innovate, their sense of autonomy and purpose drastically increases. It’s no secret that our lives are improved when we can make our own decisions. This approach becomes effective when channelling this energy towards a common goal and equipping teams to excel. Both small improvements and big leaps can benefit your team. As an existing or emerging leader, your job is to live it and help your team translate this formula into their day-to-day.

As for innovation strategies, look for inspiration wherever you can find it. Great ideas are often other people’s concepts applied to new fields. Evolution not revolution has led to some of the most important companies shaping our lives today. This is what has driven the thinking behind The Entrepreneur Within.

Mark’s perspective is rare and recent. A man who scaled a business in a tough sector from a fairytale ‘two mates in a garage’ story to $200m in revenues. Having achieved a celebrated exit, his capability led him to achieve even greater scale through his role as an ‘intrapreneur’ at his acquirer AB InBev. Few have been able to earn their stripes in both little and large organisations. For this reason, Praetura trust him with our most precious asset – our portfolio founders. As an active mentor, he helps some of the best and brightest minds in the north of England try to make their mark on the world.

Focus. Originality. Results. Growth. Ecosystem.

These are the distilled elements that have led to Mark’s consistent successes. Harbouring a natural tension whilst creating a process to follow, we will also be looking to apply his tools in our businesses.

Many overcomplicate the world of venture. As one of the fastest-growing venture businesses in the UK, 8we know the formula is simple. We look for great ideas, great people and great execution, but we pursue this honestly and relentlessly. We believe Mark’s methods will help us continue to create firsts for our industry and ‘do the impossible’ where others cannot.

We hope you enjoy the book as much as we did.

Dave Foreman

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INTRODUCTION

‘Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’

CONFUCIUS

A TRUE STORY

The words from the board were very encouraging. It was a green light. We had the ambition. We were ready to challenge the market, to shake things up. We knew that by serving the customers better, the whole business could grow. We had to find a better way, and we had tremendous ideas of where to start.

I joined the bank full of optimism. After all, I was appointed as the head of innovation for a major division. It was my job to be optimistic and creative. We had an exciting innovation pipeline, and we ran headfirst into it.

Two years later, the same problems remained; I admitted defeat and reluctantly moved to a more traditional marketing role. Looking behind me, the projects we developed gradually died. The early promises – full of hope and encouragement – ultimately seemed disconnected from reality. The whole team had done everything possible to inspire innovation from within the bank, but we were stifled at every stage. We were constrained by budget challenges, by committee timelines, and by specialist teams incentivised to point out every reason why a new approach could not work. Red tape bound us down. Our job was to run, like entrepreneurs, headlong into solving the problem, but instead, we were running through committees of treacle (to coin a collective noun). 10

I’ve led innovation portfolios in multinational companies, been a scale-up entrepreneur, worked as an intrapreneur within a global corporation, and as a venture capital investor. In every venture, I began to see the same underlying problems.

As an entrepreneur, I relished the freedom that small business brings, but I also experienced the challenges of having few resources as well as the growing pains of scaling fast. And then, in a large corporation, I was again reminded of my time at the bank, attempting to slash my way, Indiana Jones-style, through the jungle of constraints, my hat left on the other side of the door.

I began to realise that there are common threads that impede innovation within organisations of all sizes. I shared my thoughts with dozens of business leaders, all corroborating my experiences. You, as our innovator-inchief, our entrepreneur within a business, will no doubt have shared similar pain.

This book is the culmination of decades of experience innovating inside and outside established businesses. It’s the culmination of dozens of interviews with business leaders who have made things happen at companies including Nike, Sony, AB InBev, Apple and many more. You’ll hear from many of them in this book. I’ve studied where innovation has worked and, perhaps more importantly, where it hasn’t.I started collating these ideas and experiences alongside interviews, research and thoughts, and the result is this book, The Entrepreneur Within. FORGE®, the methodology that this book outlines, has become my playbook for innovation. I hope it will guide you through the challenges of innovating within an organisation, understanding where to focus, how to scale up, and explain how to keep an entrepreneurial mindset alive within any organisation, no matter how much jungle undergrowth or how many swishing poison-tipped arrows there are around you.

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IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

Do you recognise any of these pain points?

FOCUS

» We can’t articulate a coherent strategy for growth or differentiation.

» We’re too reactive to market pressures and competition, not creating our own path.

» We’re falling in love with the solution, not the problem.

» Our new initiatives don’t fit in with our mission.

ORIGINALITY

» We struggle to have genuinely creative thoughts.

» The ideas we do have don’t cut through.

» We have too many naysayers who block progress.

» We don’t seem to prioritise the most promising ideas.

RESULTS

» We’re scared of failure.

» We don’t test things quickly enough, or don’t know when things are good enough

» Decisions are taken without the right data.

» We’re not quick enough to back projects that show traction.

GROWTH

» We struggle to get new initiatives beyond a certain size.

» Our decision making is starting to slow down.

» Some of the team are becoming disenfranchised.

» We can no longer see the forest for the trees.

ECOSYSTEM

» We’re too internally focused.

» We don’t have access to the very best talent.

» We’re on the back foot with the latest market developments.

» We take on all the innovation risk ourselves. 12

If you recognise any of these challenges, the FORGE playbook can offer a new perspective on how to move forwards and unlock growth.

Innovation is critical for business growth, and, ultimately, success. You innovate or die. But how do you foster a mindset of innovation within an organisation that might have lost it? Is the current approach not working? FORGE will also diagnose the reasons why. I’ll show you how to overcome the hurdles and create an environment where entrepreneurs within a large business or organisation can be empowered.

SO WHY LISTEN TO ME?

I’ve always worked in innovation, from my first job out of university to, well, right now. Innovation is at the heart of everything I do, pretty much every day of my working life. I’ve read everything I can find on the subject and put the theories to the test in large corporations and high-growth start-ups. I advise companies and organisations across the world on innovation, how to foster it and, crucially, how to maintain it. I’ve worked in innovation roles my entire career, in organisations of all sizes. I’m an industry advisor at the University of Oxford; I’ve chaired regional economic development panels, advised governments and embarked on trade missions, all with innovation at the core. I’ve been an entrepreneur, building my own business and selling it to a multinational. I’ve also worked within corporations leading disruptive technologies and ventures, for example, at Procter & Gamble, Lloyds Banking Group, AB InBev and Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership. I’m now an angel investor, operational partner of a venture capital company, non-executive director and, yes, let’s say it, author. My career, crucially for this book, has straddled the entrepreneurial start-up, as well as working for a large corporation.

And that juxtaposition is the essence of FORGE. It is about fostering and maintaining an entrepreneurial mindset 13while navigating the restrictions of a large organisation. You have the big business resources (yay!), but also the big business red tape and complexity (boo).

I’ve first-hand experience of the very common challenges that innovators within a large organisation face. It can seem to intrapreneurs and innovators that they are seemingly stifled and stymied at every stage, regardless of the board’s understanding that innovation is required. I also saw how a lack of innovation gradually leads to a decline in the business. If a company of any size is not innovating quickly enough, you can guarantee the competition is.

As an entrepreneur, I co-founded Beer Hawk with a good friend. It was an e-commerce business that grew out of a shed and two laptops into a company with more than £90 million in revenue and a 200-strong team in less than a decade. Along the way, we sold our business to AB InBev and eventually helped integrate it into the mothership.

An innovation paradox became clear. New ventures within large organisations are increasingly constrained by processes and long-standing culture, red tape and stakeholder management. Large companies tend to be conservative, motivated by short-term profits. When an innovative business grows, it becomes more efficient, but this limits innovation. This is not the right environment for a venture requiring a start-up mindset.

On the other hand, a venture that needs to scale must implement the rigour and efficiency of large-scale business to be sustainable, all the time maintaining an innovation stream to ensure it stays ahead of the competition. These are traditionally opposed. Entrepreneurs are brilliant at innovation but often need help to scale; corporations scale effectively but struggle to innovate. It’s why so many startups fail and why so many innovations in organisations fail to gain traction.

Overcoming this paradox is what the FORGE methodology addresses. I call it ‘becoming ambidextrous’. It’s about mastering the skills of both innovation and efficiency. 14

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book is split into two parts: firstly, Growing Pains, and then FORGE, my methodology for innovation success. The first part of this book offers the context for innovation. It analyses why innovation can be such a challenge, and why it is critical for a business to survive. It addresses why it matters to be innovative, why business ventures become less innovative over time and why large organisations usually kill innovation or suffocate the creative process. I talk about the challenges you, as the innovator-in-chief, face. I discuss why companies become like this.

In the second part, I explain how we rise to these challenges and turn them to our advantage to ensure innovation is present at every stage. And, ultimately, how to create a sustainable, scaling business with longevity, an environment where people are happy to work, and that does good for the world.

FORGE has five chapters: Focus, Originality, Results, Growth and Ecosystem. It is the order by which innovations should be developed. I say ‘should’ because we know that’s not always the case. Chances are you’ll be at a different stage of the venture, or different stages with different innovations. While I’d suggest reading the book in order, you can absolutely dip into the chapter that addresses your needs most clearly. However, I do suggest you read Ecosystem soon, it is an essential element of all the other stages.

Throughout, you’ll see a series of Tales, Traps and Tips. These are interviews with some of the world’s most interesting innovators. In these pages, they offer inspirational stories, as well as hard-earned advice, the successes they had, and failures you can avoid.

I’ve also included some well-known examples of business success and failure from some of the world’s biggest companies. Full transparency: I wasn’t there for those decisions, I have no idea exactly what was going on in the head of Steve Jobs, for example, but these cases do illustrate a point, a principle, and that is very worthwhile. 15

Most of all, The Entrepreneur Within is designed as a playbook to be well-thumbed, to have scribbled notes in the margin, and to sit open at your desk, ready to guide you towards the next step.

This book offers decades of learning from more than a dozen people – innovators who have made mistakes and discovered patterns of success. It can act as a shortcut to becoming The Entrepreneur Within.

THE TRUE REASON FOR THIS BOOK

I’m passionate about innovation. I love the buzz of being part of new ventures, I love hearing how they succeed. When businesses grow, when they scale efficiently, it improves the lives of people, it improves the economy, it benefits everyone. But here’s the real crux: innovations can change the world. I believe that if we solve the problems of innovation, we can solve at least some of the problems of the world. That’s why I wrote this book.

Mark Roberts, 2025 Harrogate, Yorkshire

STAYING AN ARTIST

‘Every child is an artist; the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.’

PABLO PICASSO

LIKE A PIECE OF ART, all business ventures begin with a blank sheet of paper. There are no rules; there are no processes. It’s creator mode. This is the time to embrace the problem and find the solution. It’s a thrilling moment. You are drawing your future.

Give a child paper and pencils, and they embark on a similar creative journey, unencumbered by the ‘expected way of doing things’. They interpret what is going on in their free minds. It’s quick, often scruffy; it’s colourful; it’s energetic; it’s creativity at its purest. What is in the child’s mind is what appears on the paper before them. They’re not adhering to the rule of thirds; they’re not thinking about contrast or perspective, about light direction or colour palettes. They’re simply creating.

Now ask an adult to draw the same thing – say a house – and if they’re as artistically talented as I am, making a terrible attempt at the brief. If I were drawing in front of a peer, I’d be a bit embarrassed. I’d ask myself questions about style, form, colour and size. I doubt it will be free-flowing. I’ll have a handful of half-remembered ‘rules’ and a lifetime of societal norms; I’d have a tang of fear of failure and abundant self-criticism. I’d also, no doubt, have a deadline looming and a phone buzzing. This will not be my most creative moment.

The business venture, the new product or service, the thing that will make your customer very happy, begins with that blank piece of paper. A start-up is like a child, 19unburdened by rules and corporate regulations and free from financial obligation. There is little need to please stakeholders, procurement departments or the legal team. There is complete flexibility. And then there’s speed, plenty of speed.

That said, there is often no money in the bank, no customers, no established routes to market, and even if there were, there would be no products to sell. Oh, there is no IT support either.

A large corporation is a grown-up, acting, hopefully, in a very grown-up way. Risk is mitigated, finance is in order, processes are in place, and regulations are strictly adhered to. But as Picasso so succinctly said: ‘The problem is staying an artist when you grow up’. If he were writing a business book (and thank goodness that was never on his agenda), he’d have written, ‘The problem is staying an entrepreneur when you grow up’.

It’s easy to fantasise about early-stage businesses. It’s the ultimate freedom. But ask any entrepreneur who’s moved from a piece of paper to a company, and while there are rose-tinted reflections, the reality is that it is hard.

From the moment a new company is born, and the trading name is chosen, the business is constantly in flux. No organisation is ever static, but early-stage ventures take this to the extreme. Many companies never make it out of what I call the ‘Ignition’ phase, but those that do can experience a blaze of growth which can be one of the most rewarding, if terrifying, periods in the typical business life cycle. This is especially true once you move from a one- or two-person company to employing staff. And once you are growing, it’s time to start innovating again, and quickly. For those ventures that can reach a substantial turnover, there is too frequently a tendency for leaders to pat themselves on the back, sit back, and wonder why the company is stagnating. They get stuck, really stuck. And it’s actually at this phase where many businesses fall, whether a 20start-up with twenty people or a product team within a huge organisation. Ask someone who is trying to innovate within a large organisation, launch a new product, lead an innovation team, or just see how to make things better, and you’ll get a similar response. Innovating is hard; when that’s in a grown-up company, it can be harder still. That’s why I wrote this book.

This book provides a methodology for creating the ideal conditions that will help innovation take hold, whether you’re employee number 2 or 902. We will look at techniques to instil the founder’s mindset required to innovate, highlight the traps businesses fall into when trying to innovate, and showcase the success stories to inspire your business venture. We’ll hear the pitfalls to avoid and secrets to follow to maintain innovation at every level from those who have been through it, and my own experiences.

Innovation is inspired by a great number of reasons, but the environment needs to exist to encourage it.

THOSE AWKWARD TEENAGE YEARS

This first section is called ‘Growing Pains’, and with reason: the transition from start-up to successful enterprise is seldom smooth. All founders hope their ‘baby’ will grow into a flourishing adult: successful, wiser and wealthier. Sure, there’ll be the terrible twos, the stroppy toddlers, the belligerent eleven-year-old and the oh-so-tricky teenage years before slowly calming down, settling into a comfortable house with an armchair, disposable income and a garden to maintain.

But it’s not like that. Businesses are, of course, different to people. Many of us will have missed those formative years of a 21company and joined directly at the point of having a little middle-aged spread and that lovely garden. And that’s often the point you’re asked to shake it up. To pull a product or service out of the bag, to supercharge growth. But first it’s important to understand exactly what the growing pains are that companies of all sizes experience.

First, as Led Zeppelin succinctly put it, there’s a communication breakdown. As companies or business units grow, communication across the board is more complex. Informal chat is less effective, and it becomes harder to distinguish the important information from the noise.

Along with increasing size comes a loss of agility. Decision-making often slows down, the organisation becomes less responsive. The need for an approval process, or at least ‘alignment’, is necessary. An added complication is the fear of losing what the company enjoyed in the first place. That’s the fear of losing the agility, speed and the culture. A start-up environment is thrilling, quick and relatively flat in its structure. As the company grows into adulthood, the founding team loses influence as new hires are rapidly onboarded. This often puts a strain on those there from the beginning.

One of the growing pains we see is operational inefficiency. Roles become ambiguous as new team members overlap responsibilities. The initial ‘all together’ ethos without clear, formal job descriptions means there can be a lack of clarity. And what works for a small team might not scale effectively.

I’ll go into more reasons why businesses develop like this as they grow; it’s one of the key challenges you will face. It’s about understanding how it needs to grow efficiently, and – if my editor would let me put this in big bold caps, I would – continues to keep that entrepreneurial mindset alive. This is the challenge this book addresses. Show me a company that hasn’t experienced it. 22

THE CREATOR MODE SWITCH

So, how do we keep this entrepreneurial mindset alive and thriving within an established organisation? You see, with the very best of intentions, people like to optimise things. To tinker. As businesses grow, there is a requirement to improve processes and make the entire system more efficient. It’s necessary but problematic.

Every stage of the business life cycle presents benefits but also poses challenges, often significant ones towards the latter stages. The problems experienced during rapid growth are very different from those associated with stagnation. The business must adapt at every stage to survive. It’s also about how a business adapts to shifts in trends, economic turbulence, as well as major upheaval.

Decision-making processes, communication and governance systems evolve as the organisation grows. A successful corporate organisation has typically mastered these. In the first part of this book, we’ll discuss how and why these changes happen. Still, it’s worth pointing out now that as a company moves through these stages, the environment for early-stage innovation usually becomes increasingly desolate. It’s critically important to look for ways to balance existing revenue streams with developing new ones to achieve sustainable profitability.

Constant change, without direction, can mean that an organisation can spend a lot of money and considerable effort without generating meaningful progress. Growth is critical. Businesses, to survive, need to be able to drive efficiency andinnovate. They need to become ambidextrous. This book is about finding ways to be efficient andinnovative. 23

EMBRACING THE BUSINESS LIFE CYCLE

ALL BUSINESSES GO THROUGH a very similar life cycle.1 It’s been written about at length. The key challenge is how a business can spark new growth when experiencing decline. Understanding this life cycle is integral to maintaining growth and building a sustainable business. The diagram I’ve built for this S-curve shows when innovation needs to happen for the business to break away from the potential decline; it’s called jumping the curve. Spoiler alert: you need to be innovating early, not towards the end when the decline looks ominous.

This book isn’t concerned with the first two phases of this S-curve. That is your start-up business and there are plenty of books about that. Instead, it’s about how we can ignite new growth in an established business.

A word of warning: revenue as an indicator lags far behind action. Innovation efforts need to start sooner, much sooner, than most businesses realise.

Most successful business ventures will typically pass through five distinct phases: 25

1. IGNITION

The exciting, but somewhat terrifying bit, is the start-up phase. The emphasis is on developing the value proposition and validating the concept – are people buying it? We then need to progress by testing the riskiest assumptions and finding market traction. And while this is called ignition, it’s also the time many new ventures fail to find the spark in the first place or are snuffed out before too much money has been spent.

2. BLAZE

Product-market fit. If you’ve hit the Blaze phase, it’s usually a sign that you’re on the way to achieving the fabled ‘product-market fit’. Life looks pretty good. You’ve survived start- up. Widgets are flying out of the warehouse, sign-ups are exceeding expectations. It’s likely the internal processes haven’t quite caught up with the pace of demand, so things might feel quite chaotic. Of course, the other scenario at this stage is for the new venture not to survive, becoming another innovation failure statistic. Let’s call that the blaze of glory!

3. COMBUSTION

The growth phase or, ideally, the sustained growth phase. The break- even point came and went without as much as a bottle of sparkling English, and it’s starting to generate positive cash flow. Sales, while maybe no longer being the talk of the town, continue to increase with the ebb and flow of the market tide. However, at risk of sounding like a horoscope, there are likely to be some darker clouds forming. Maybe there are new competitors, demands for new capital investment, and pressures on gross profit margins. This is the time to prioritise making the next big innovation.

4. EMBERS

You’ve now been around for a while. People know the brand, but new sales are more challenging to achieve, profit margins continue to thin, and the pressure on cash flow is real. The length of this decline phase can vary considerably, but unless reinvention is achieved now, an eventual market exit is inevitable. Urgent attention is now needed to extend the business life cycle. You definitely better be innovating.

5. REIGNITION OR EXTINCTION

Uh-oh. We’re in decline or, euphemistically, transition. In this stage of the business life cycle, sales, profitability and cash flow often decline in unison. The only way here is down. Or up. Choose reignition. Reignition requires innovation. And quickly. It’s already usually too late. Your current offering is no longer fit for market. Innovate or die. 26

HOW GROWTH STIFLES CREATIVITY

‘You can’t allow tradition to get in the way ofinnovation. There’s a need to respect the past, but it’s a mistake to revere your past.’

BOB IGER, CEO OF THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY

THAT WORD ‘INNOVATION’

Innovation. Yes, ‘innovation’. That word. The one that gets batted around in meetings, in articles, in your brain as you’re about to fall asleep. Are we innovative enough? Was our latest product innovative? Is our marketing innovative? What on earth does ‘innovation’ actually mean anyway?

Thousands of definitions have been offered up. For those interested in a spot of etymology, the word’s origins lay in the mid-sixteenth century and emerged from the Latin innovatmeaning ‘renewed, altered’ and from the verb innovare: in(‘into’) and novare(‘make new’, from novus‘new’). But it wasn’t until the 1950s that the word took off in popular diction.

The word innovation has increased by a factor of nine over the last seventy years, according to Google. Incidentally, at the same time, the word ‘invention’ has dramatically declined since the end of the Industrial Revolution. There are subtle differences. Invention, perhaps obviously, is defined as the action of inventing something, typically a process or device. Its Latin roots are closer to ‘discover’ or ‘finding out’ than ‘renewing’.

Personally, I prefer the original ‘discovery’ concept. That’s because I think of innovation as forging previously unseen connections. That’s ‘forging previously unseen connections’. I’m repeating it because it’s important. I do, however, offer two caveats. First, we’re talking about 29innovation within a business here, so there needs to be a commercial benefit. Secondly, while this definition could cover all new process improvements and marketing tweaks, we’re intentionally focusing on more transformational innovation for this book. Specifically, new ventures that are a significant step away from the core business (see the Innovation frontiers section which follows). This is not to say that the FORGE Methodology in Part Two of this book is not helpful for all innovation projects, but that some elements will deliver more significant benefits to projects with more radical intent.

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INNOVATION FRONTIERS

‘INNOVATION FRONTIERS’ SOUNDS LIKE a fancy term for striding out into the Wild West firing off ideas into the wilderness, but really, it’s about how different the innovation is to the core business.

As you can see from the diagram, I find it very helpful to separate whereto play from howto win.2 As you can see, the level of risk increases the further away from the core business that you go. 31

CORE: OPTIMISING THE EXISTING OFFERING

Innovating at the core delivers incremental improvements for existing customers or improvements to the company’s existing offerings. The goal in optimising the core is to innovate and expand core offerings, to be able to gain efficiencies by either improving performance or reducing costs. It’s extending the business life cycle. It can, and should, be part of everyone’s job, regardless of their function.

ADJACENT: EXPANDING INTO NEW AREAS

This expansion could involve finding new customers in adjacent markets or developing new use cases by adding new products or services to existing propositions. The aim is to leverage existing capabilities while exploring new opportunities that are still close to the current business.

TRANSFORMATIONAL: DEVELOPING BREAKTHROUGHS

This type of innovation aims to develop new breakthroughs and invent new propositions for markets that might not exist yet. The objective is often to create significant shifts in the industry landscape, and it involves much more radical change. And risk. But there is much more potential for reward.

This book is concerned with those innovations beyond the core. So how do you know where to play? And how are we going to win? Thinking about frontiers in this way poses five important questions for a new venture:

» How far away are we from our core competencies?

»