Driving sustainable growth and innovation: pathways to high performance leadership

Abstract

The challenge for business leaders, across all industries, is to recognize and accept a new reality in which easy answers, quick fixes and magic bullets are harder to find. This is a reality in which pathways to success are increasingly complex and ambiguous – a reality in which organic growth and innovation emerge as the key drivers of sustainable top‐ and bottom‐line growth. For most companies, this means cutting costs, M&A and operational excellence must be augmented by a sharp focus on building and driving engines for sustainable growth and innovation. In our continued analysis of industry leaders who have been able to drive sustainable growth and innovation over the long term, four major differences have emerged. They have chosen to focus their strategies around organic growth and accelerated innovation building portfolios of compelling and differentiated offerings for well understood customer and market segments; building powerful innovation platforms supported by a rich pipeline of products and services; and building a more robust network of sources and partners who can deliver superior value across the extended enterprise. They know the marketplace well and can effectively take action on their intelligence – combining a wide range of insights (customer and consumer, technology convergence and standards, value chain and competitors) a multitude of idea “sources” and “depositors,” and a robust concept to customer innovation process. They apply disciplined processes more flexibly to the growth and innovation arena where pipelines need to be constantly adjusted, where fast to failure and accelerated experimentation is often as important as guaranteed success. They develop new metrics and measures that shift the behavior and culture of the organization toward sustainable organic growth and innovation – including both business scorecards and individual and team performance measures.