Business Innovation Programme

This session draws on key elements of "Jumping the S-curve" as presented in Paul Nunes and Tim Breene's book, including how companies can outperform their competitors and increase profitability. Participants will also learn how to identify hidden S-curves and use BEMI to navigate growth cycles and overcome economic and market disruptions.

As the first session in the 'Building an Ambidextrous Organisation' series, we begin by introducing the concept of "ambidexterity" and its role in generating lasting success for organisations. Participants will learn to differentiate between management and leadership and their mapping onto exploitation and exploration. The session will also focus on identifying the organisational structures, processes, and capabilities needed for successful exploration.

The second session in the series covers the design of an Innovation Process with a focus on Ideation, Incubation, and Scaling. Participants will learn about selection criteria, identifying organisational assets, and mitigating potential impact from mature business units. Participants will evaluate their organisation's current innovation process, developing ways to ensure its success.

We begin by reviewing the learnings from the first and second sessions in this series. Participants will then reflect on past innovation efforts, identifying common causes of failure. Participants will then work in groups to design a new innovation process, focusing on the structural solutions for communication, culture, people and process. At the end of the session, the groups will present their suggested processes, taking feedback from the rest of the cohort.

In this session, participants will discuss the key elements of a business model and how they relate to one another. They’ll be introduced to the Business Model Canvas, a tool which they’ll use to map out how their business creates and captures values. We’ll also review some successful examples to illustrate how and why business model innovation can be a powerful source of disruption.

Participants in this session will discuss the relationship between, and the relative advantages of, technical innovation and business model innovation. This is followed by some examples of how BC businesses have innovated their business models. We will look at the kind of outputs of a business model that would appeal to a growth investor, and the tools necessary for business model innovation. Finally, participants will plan a test they can run to increase Willingness-to-Pay and/or lower Willingness-to-Sell through subtle changes to how their business creates and captures value.

The final session of the programme focuses on learning the fundamentals of building a business case, including types, scales and considerations from both CEO and senior manager perspectives. Participants will also gain knowledge on the importance of reporting and tracking mechanisms for successful innovation plans.