Scaling-Up Corporate Startups: Turn innovation concepts into business impact

This book focuses on one question: How can large companies generate business impact from non-incremental innovation?

The situation seems paradox. Winning in non-incremental innovation should be the domain of large corporates, not of greenfield startups. Yet, 7 out of 8 corporate startups do not generate business impact . And the media is full of stories that greenfield startups are attacking and even ‘disrupting’ incumbents.

To stack the odds for success, large corporates have tried to emulate the methods and approaches of greenfield startups. They set up explorative innovation units (called Innovation Centers, Incubators, Accelerators, Digital Labs, Innovation Outposts, Fab Labs, Maker Spaces, etc.). Around the globe there are more than 600 of these. But returns on innovation are decreasing – despite increasing investments into innovation .

So apparently there is a problem.

We think that the root cause – and hence the Archimedean point for solving the problem –lies in one part of the end-to-end innovation process. Corporates need to think one step further, beyond their explorative innovation units. They need to actively shape the phase that comes after a promising innovation concept has been found and validated.

We call this phase Scaling-Up. In this phase, business impact is generated. Success in this phase requires an orchestrated interplay between the corporate startup and the core organization, built on a solid methodology.

The book is written for Top Managers and members of the Board who are concerned about the business impact that their innovation investments create. It is also written for corporate practitioners working in explorative innovation units, in Corporate Innovation Management, Corporate Research, Group Technology, Corporate Strategy, Corporate In-house Consulting or in comparable functions. And we also had Senior Management from Business Units (BUs) in mind when we wrote this book.

With excellence in Scaling-Up, a corporate startup has the entrepreneurial momentum of a small company and (by leveraging the assets of its parent company) an ‘unfair advantage’ in the innovation race. With every successful corporate scaleup, the company not only increases growth, EBIT and market cap – it also actively reshapes its core business for tomorrow. Without excellence in Scaling-Up, validated innovation concepts will not generate business impact. In other words, if a company is not good in Scaling-Up, all work done in the Ideation and Validation phases is just a costly hobby.

This book draws on our extensive consulting experience in this space and is co-written with our clients. We assembled a cross-industry ‘Peer Group’ of well-known, large European companies – all of them widely seen as good innovators or even innovation leaders. In the process, the group members analyzed relevant research, shared their Good Practices, developed and validated methodological frameworks and helped each other in Peer Coaching.

The reader of this book can benefit from the Peer Group’s work and findings. Some readers might be more interested in ‘how-to’ methods, others more in practical experiences. This book contains both. It is organized in four parts

Part 1 – ‘UNDERSTAND’ provides the thinking framework for excellence in Scaling-up.
Part 2 – ‘PREPARE’ takes a closer look into the phase that precedes Scaling-Up.
Part 3 – ‘SCALING-UP’ presents the framework for effective Scaling-Up that the Peer Group has co-created.