Corporate Explorer

6Scale: Assembling the Assets to Build a New Venture

A quick scan of Amazon's list of top books on innovation will yield an important insight: managers spend a lot more time thinking about how to generate new ideas than they do on how to make them successful. There is copious literature on customer insight, open innovation, and a myriad of other fabulous approaches to generating the spark of imaginative brilliance that gets innovation started. Lean startup has popularized business incubation. Business and engineering schools have put the practices of business experimentation and user-centered design at the heart of the curriculum. What gets much less attention is the third discipline of innovation, scaling. Scaling is turning a validated idea into a revenue-generating business.

By 2019, this had become Balaji Bondili's challenge. He had successfully incubated Pixel as a new way for Deloitte to solve complex client problems. Bondili and his team had nurtured the new venture, run experiments to validate its value to clients, and learned how to work alongside the existing Deloitte business. They knew that they had a viable business model that was getting real traction with clients and starting to generate fees. He now had to take the venture to the next level by scaling Pixel into a sustainable source of revenue. What should Bondili do? What is the playbook for a Corporate Explorer like Bondili in this situation? What is the equivalent of lean startup in incubation or design thinking ...