Name: Rutuja P.

Valte
Roll No.: 20MBAOPE045
Subject: TIM
MBA- Operations

Case Study: 3
90 Days plan to increase your company’s innovation

While most successful companies can lay credit to some innovations, most have occurred by
chance and the companies actually lack an orderly, reliable way to innovate regularly. While
some companies address this problem by building large and expensive innovation centres or
R&D facilities, Anthony shows there is a middle way that almost any company can pursue
regardless of resources.
Phase 1: Define your innovation buckets
Innovations meant to improve the core business (the former of the two innovation categories)
should be tied to the current strategy and managed mostly with the primary organizational
structure. These new growth initiatives push the frontier of your strategy by offering new or
complementary products to existing customers, moving into adjacent product or geographic
markets, or developing something utterly original, perhaps delivered in a novel way.
During this phase, you should spend up to two weeks developing rough but real numbers for
the revenue and profits your current business will bring in five years and see how that
compares with your five-year plan. Overall, the first phase of creating an innovation plan is
having everyone involved understand the two types of innovation and then analysing the
allocation of resources between innovating on the core business and innovating on new
opportunities.
Phase 2: Zero in on a few strategic opportunity areas
These are areas that fit within your new-growth buckets and seem large enough to impact
significantly the growth gap identified in phase 1.
Given the limited time and the overall goal of creating a MVIS, rather than spending months
or years on analysis, spend three weeks having key executives conduct research, from
meeting with customers to investigating new initiatives in your industry and related ones. A
technology that will enable customers to do that job much more easily, cheaply, or
conveniently, or a change in the economic, regulatory, geo-political, technologic or social
landscape that is greatly intensifying the need for the job.
By combining all three criteria, you avoid some of the common innovation mistakes,
including pursuing a phantom opportunity only because it seems so big that there must be
1
money in it somewhere, or wandering into a new market where you have no competitive
advantage.
Phase 3: Form a small, dedicated team to develop the innovations
As Anthony points out, about 75 percent of VC-backed start-ups fail to return any of their
investors’ money and half never reach four years old and these companies are dedicated to
innovation. If your issue is a lack of resources, the first step to offset this problem is to bring
visibility to all innovation initiatives. Once you finish this effort, you should be able to
identify the projects that are not enhancing your core strategy or creating strategic initiatives,
then cancel these efforts and more the resources to your MVIS (innovation program).
If the constraint you are facing is an insufficient number of team members with experience
leading innovation efforts, the goal is to train your team quickly.
Team members will understand and learn how to innovate by immersing themselves in the
MVIS, while a checklist like the one above will ensure they stay on course.
Phase 4: Create a mechanism to shepherd projects
This is not a copy of your existing executive team (if it was, people would just revert to their
existing roles) but a leadership team focused on new innovation. Every project should have a
senior executive sponsor or champion who believes in it deeply, but you should NOT require
approval from the entire group to move forward. An MVIS requires senior leaders to get
involved with budgeting, performance management, supplier management and other
company systems since the overall corporate functions are not part of the minimally viable
innovation system (hence the minimally viable).
While the phrase “innovate or die” may be true, what is important is to innovate smartly.