Leadership
When is the right time for agile business innovation?
A five-area quick scan — profitability, product, people, purpose and environment — to decide whether now is the moment for agile business innovation.
Agile Business Innovation Design — Agility is a Verb
38-Week Transformation Program
Agility is a Verb
Most businesses now innovate their products faster than they innovate themselves. That gap is where growth stalls, talent leaves and margin quietly disappears. We close that gap. Create compelling purpose, an agile structure, innovative culture and inspiring leadership team in 38 weeks!
Trusted by world-class organizations
ASMLBMWBoschBpostClaasContinentalElectronic ArtsEMI MusicHeinekenIFFKLMLindeDoctors Without BordersNational OperaRocheSeco WarwickWabcoand many more
40+
years of change mastership
Tweaking the business model is no longer enough.
The world has changed faster than the business models. Most companies try to innovate their way out of trouble. That strategy is failing. Only 12 per cent achieve what they set out to do.
Meanwhile the influence of corporations now exceeds that of almost any other institution on the planet. It is increasingly up to businesses to find the solutions.
"We need businesses that can anticipate, innovate and cooperate at an accelerated rate to solve the problems of tomorrow."
The 38-Week Process
The art and science of Agility
Agility is a consequence of how you design the business. It is not a personality trait.
Agile does not mean sprints and stand-ups. The agility we work on operates at the level of the whole organisation. Its purpose. Its structure. Its culture. Its leadership. Its ecosystem.
Innovation does not mean product innovation alone. It means the willingness and the capability to redesign the business itself, at the same pace you expect to redesign products and services.
"Agile business innovation is the capacity of an organisation to continuously reinvent both what it offers and how it organises itself, in response to a rapidly changing world."
It is not a destination. It is a discipline. The destination is a business that has made continuous reinvention a way of being.
Four dimensions. Eight factors. One discipline.
Anticipation
Looping and learning
Read the environment fast enough to act on what you read. Get back into contact with real people, with real problems, looking for real solutions. Then make meaning of what you hear.
Innovation
Creativity and commercialisation
Turn what you sense into something the world will pay for. Close the innovation gap across all ten types of innovation, not only product. Design the price into the offer, not after it.
Direction
Purpose and structure
Give the business a heart and a spine. A structure without sense is bureaucracy. Sense without structure is sentiment. You need both.
Cooperation
Priorities and partnership
Choose four innovation priorities the whole leadership team owns together. Then build the internal communities and external alliances that scale them.
How we work
38 weeks. Your leadership team. Your live innovation projects.
Mastering Agility and Innovation runs on your site, over 38 weeks. It is not a training course about transformation. It is the transformation, run by your own leadership team, with us alongside.
The work follows a fixed order. Anticipation first, because until you are genuinely in contact with your customers you cannot know what to innovate. Then Innovation. Then Direction. Then Cooperation.
What changes.
- Time to market falls, because the business adapts at the pace the products demand.
- Purpose, identity and values are redefined and actually used to make decisions.
- Customer contact becomes a structured discipline, held by the people who build things.
- The product and service ecosystem becomes coherent instead of accumulated.
- The structure is redesigned around teams, with clear roles and real decision rights.
- Cooperation across functions replaces the internal competition that silos produce.
We have taught leaders, coaches and consultants the art and science of agile business innovation for over 40 years — consulting with multinationals, family businesses and start-ups all over the world.
Sari van Poelje
Director, Agile Business Innovation Design
The Agile Business Innovation BookRead about the book
The thinking behind the method.
The book Agile Business Innovation by author and founder Sari van Poelje sets out the full model. Four dimensions, eight factors, the transformation roadmap, and forty years of case material behind them.
The book is at the publisher. Sign up and we will tell you when it is out.
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Our promise is to transform your business in 38 weeks. Supporting and challenging to create agile business innovation is what makes us tick.