Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 7

The Six Outcomes of Strategic Innovation

A colour is well suited to the eye if its bright and agreeable tones stimulate and refresh the vision, and in the same way we ought to apply our intellectual vision to those models which can inspire it to attain its own virtue. [Such a model is] no sooner seen than it rouses the spectator to action, and yet it does not form his character by mere imitation, but by promoting … a dominating purpose.

Plutarch, Life of Pericles

While our double-loop at the end of the previous chapter points out key elements in the act of strategic innovation, it does not specify how this innovation might be promoted. To aid this we would do well, as we explained with creativity and strategy in the prologue of this book, to give purpose by focussing minds around the potential outcomes of strategic innovation and think about the processes that might precede and encourage it. This chapter outlines six generic outcomes of strategic innovation, the next chapter deals with the practical steps that can be taken towards a process to promote these outcomes.

There are many books on innovation that specify a best practice approach outlining the steps that should be taken to generate innovations and providing examples from great companies to back this up. However, as we indicated in the previous chapter, even if one could reduce innovation to a series of steps its widespread imitation would actually lead to a decline in innovation through the ‘law’ of widespread ...