Our Innovation Story
Our innovation practice commenced in the peak of the economic crisis in 2008-2009.
During the crisis most organizations affected by it were taking various initiatives to manage the downturn and come out stronger. There was lot of talk about the need to innovate. There were conferences and interviews and articles where business leaders spoke about the need to innovate.
In our conversations with several senior business leaders and interactions with our clients we understood that even though innovation is considered as the holy grail to survive and drive growth, for innovation there was dependence on bright sparks and eureka moments that were far and few. Adoption of best available technologies was also not yielding the desired outcomes and impact. We realized that innovation was not predictable and sustainable in most organizations. This would definitely hurt the companies in the mid to long term, what with several start-ups already knocking on the industry doors with their disruptive ideas!
“At BMGI, our mission is to help our clients unlock potential and deliver results. Given the context, our focus was to help organizations build, deliver, and sustain superior performance even in challenging times.”
The challenges before BMGI were
Building our innovation practice
To Build our innovation practice we sought answers for the following:
How do organizations build the future while achieving short-term goals – being ambidextrous?
Is innovation more of serendipity or are there tools/techniques/methods that can enable innovation?
If innovation is all about breaking boundaries then can systematic / method-based innovation deliver – the paradox of structure?
Can innovation be democratized or is it the handful few in the organization who need to shoulder the responsibility?
Can there be a culture of innovation or is it too unsettling/ will disturb the applecart?
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We researched some of the best practices in the world of innovation: design thinking concepts from Stanford to Clayton Christenson concept of Job to be Done (JTBD). We understood the organizational inertia that would have to be overcome for organizations to innovate. Based on these inputs we developed our own innovation assets which became the foundation elements for building our innovation services.
One of our core assets is a process for innovation called D4 (Define Discover Develop and Demonstrate). D4 overcomes some of the shortcomings of the traditional design thinking process to help individuals and teams to identify critical customer insights that are under-served and then use a wide variety of tools to ideate and generate a large quantity of ideas before selecting the best ideas to pilot.
Over the last 15 years, our D4 methodology (design thinking++) has been used by hundreds of organizational teams across the globe to work on some of the more exciting innovation opportunities creating over US$1 billion of customer benefits.
Over time we have also evolved a robust process for opportunity identification using a variety of techniques/processes such as customer in-sighting; market trends and technology trends to build a portfolio of innovation opportunities that are aligned to the business strategy.
You can read more in our book “The Innovator’s Toolkit – 50+ Techniques for Predictable & Sustainable Organic growth”
