Imagine you and your team are on the 5th meeting again to discuss what can the team do differently to grow the business. All the suggestions given are always about doubling down on the current strategies with multiplied effort, but you know you need to do something more disruptive and different. You want to innovate, but what exactly are you looking to innovate?

Corporate innovation means having out-of-the-box thinking as a strategy within your business. Yes, you are going to include innovation as part of your core business strategies. Corporate innovation can refer to product innovation, division innovation or business model innovation. To put this into perspective, Uber and Netflix, for example, disrupted the taxi and video rental industries respectively with business model innovation.

Many would have thought having a new idea would define the success of a corporate innovation strategy. The most common practice out there is to invest in a new service or product that is related directly to our core business growth. However, as we grow and expand based on that idea, the organizational transformations can be challenging. Corporate innovation goes beyond introducing a new product into the business chain. What makes an innovation project fails is often the people who lack the muscle that innovates, and a pipeline of talent who value innovation.

Two-thirds of companies innovate in order to grow or differentiate themselves from their competitors, while half of companies innovate to satisfy their customer needs. Customer needs are constantly changing, which means innovation is needed just to stay relevant survive .) In this new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish. The only way to grow and outcompete the market is to innovate.