To meet ambitious growth objectives, strategy executives at a global technology giant had concluded that the company needed to go beyond its core business and develop new engines for growth. At the same time, they understood that competitors were also aggressively searching for their next billion-dollar businesses. Given the team’s extensive investments in growth beyond the core, they decided to benchmark their approach against competitor approaches and get a better view of innovation best practices.
Business Talent Group put together an expert four-person team. It was led by one of the nation’s top innovation experts—formerly a Senior Partner at Innosight, the boutique consultancy founded by Clay Christensen—and supported by experienced growth specialists and analysts. Relying on extensive prior experience and a range of academic and industry sources, the team analyzed how other tech companies approach adjacent growth markets. Then, the consultants worked to synthesize relevant patterns, evaluate successes and failures, and quantify the contribution of various types of new ventures in that overall growth.
Our consultants organized their findings around the most common pain points that emerged from the work—for example, the difficulty of reconciling innovation best practices with existing corporate goals and attitudes—and presented to senior stakeholders in a tightly structured workshop. Then, they moved on to the second phase of the project: helping the client evaluate which adjacent opportunities were most closely aligned with current strategies.
