We help companies to understand the ecosystems beyond the known: Which players are out there, what are their innovation strategies, which future scenarios are likely?

We work with our clients to defining a winning value proposition for their non-incremental innovation within those ecosystems. We help them to identify the strategic leverage points which could be the basis for sustainable competitive advantage.

We bring our clients together with the relevant players to design and prototype cross-value-chain / cross-industry innovations. With our deep expertise in Open Innovation we know the pitfalls – and we steer clear of them.

And finally, since innovating with an ecosystem mindset is also unknown territory for the company, we help our clients to win their organization.

We work in project settings or in workshop programs.

Due to the visibility and the complexity of ecosystem innovation, our projects are usually commissioned by Heads of Corporate Innovation Management. In most cases, the methodology we use (e.g. for developing appropriate business models or for defining the strategic leverage points within an ecosystem) are proprietary. We work in a transparent way and share this methodology with our clients so that it becomes a part of their tool box.

Workshop programs usually combine some research at the desktop and in the field, some internal workshops and workshops with carefully selected managers from companies which could be parts of the ecosystem innovation. In these workshops, we usually work in inspiring locations with modern facilitation tools.

Since more than 3 years we have been at the forefront of what today is called “ambidexterity” or “dual innovation”: The growing awareness that incremental and non-incremental innovation can’t be managed in the same way. Actually, we wrote one of the first ground-breaking articles on it.

Based on this deep expertise and the constant contact to non-incremental innovators from a variety of industries we have developed a proprietary approach how to address the scaling-up problem.

We help companies to find their own specific ways to move forward. For some, it means taking out some staff from the core organization which works in agile work styles and in self-organized ways to scale up great innovation concepts. For some, it means “unfreezing” the core organization via a multitude of activities with the goal of making it more receptive for non-incremental innovation.

For individual companies, we work in a project setting. We also run cross-company Best Practice workshops in which a number of companies meet in order to share their views and experience.

Our proprietary approach builds on the concept of “critical tensions” that need to be managed for successful scale-up. These critical tensions refer to significant differences between the corporate start-up and the existing organization such as e.g. culture, decision-making, KPIs and funding. In a joint project, we help our clients to understand their specific situation and to work out their own approaches to manage them.

Our Best Practice workshops build on the “wisdom of the crowd” of non-incremental innovators from leading companies. While no single company may have found the ultimate solution for the scale-up problem, there are plenty of insights into what works and what doesn’t for the individual aspects of the scale-up problem.

We help companies to decide which topics are suitable for innovation clusters and we help in making work in these clusters excellent.

We share our insights about how leading firms are deciding on whether or not to work in a cluster for a given innovation challenge. We profile the fit of open approaches to innovation (including clusters) for the innovation challenge at hand as a basis for decision.

Once the decision for engaging in a cluster is made, we help in setting up the key prerequisites for success. Usually in innovation clusters there is a complex mesh-up of stakeholders and their expectations – We are aware of this and act accordingly

We are running a compact project.

We start off with a series of stakeholder interviews in order to understand the different views. We then conduct targeted yet productive analyses (without “boiling the ocean”) and highly engaging workshops with state-of-the-art Design Thinking techniques

We come up insights about the opportunities and the gaps and develop an actionable implementation plan that does not require consulting support.