The Innovation Hub as a means to reinvent your business
History has proven that sooner or later someone will come along disrupt your current business and eventually make you irrelevant, through new business models, new technology, or clever solutions that are close to your customers. To proactively disrupt and reinvent your business – along the waves of societal and environmental trends – is key.
Disrupting and reinventing yourself basically means daring to move on to the next level of technology and business models, in order to retain your relevance and attraction, and to continue bringing value to your ecosystem. In the era of the Sustainability Revolution this includes exploring the potential to co-create solutions for some of the wicked problems of the world, and to dare to go beyond business as usual.
One of the best ways to do this is pursuing continuous optimisation of your current business, while at the same time exploring and developing future business opportunities – in separate business areas or organisational units.
Because today’s organisations have been created to optimise what they already do – not to explore and develop future possibilities. Consequently, existing business often suffocates new and future business opportunities in their infancy. Quite often because new ventures initially require disproportionate amounts of time compared to what they initially contribute to the business.
Experiences from many organisations around the world show that the best solution is a structure that allows a fruitful and parallel co-existence of the new and the old. While the existing core business focuses entirely on improving itself, active research of possible future business opportunities (second or third horizon) is channelled to more or less independent innovation hubs and incubators. A phenomenon that has grown increasingly popular, but is not completely free of challenges.
I recently talked to Tomas Granlund, a senior business and product leader, who has many years of experience from both building and running innovation hubs. Recently with a focus on identifying solutions – enabled by technology – supporting the circular economy.
Listen to our conversation in the video below.
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About the author
Elisabet Lagerstedt
Elisabet Lagerstedt is the founder and director of Future Navigators. As a trusted advisor, consultant, and Executive Coach, she helps business leaders navigate beyond business as usual to build Better Business and co-create a better future - through insight, strategy, innovation, and transformation. Elisabet is also the author of Better Business, Better Future (2022) and Navigera in i Framtiden (2018).