Key Takeaways from “Corporate Incubation: the Key to Innovation in an Uncertain Market”

How can corporations build effective incubation engines?
How can they create new, sustainable businesses within their organizations?
Three key takeaways from the webinar include:
Mastering the Three Key Disciplines of Innovation: Companies have to learn how to explore new market areas through the three key disciplines of innovation: ideate, incubate, and scale. As we have seen time and time again, many companies are good at ideation, which is when they generate new ideas through processes like design thinking and hackathons. However, once an idea is developed, companies need to go a step further and determine if it is valid and if customers will pay for it – this is when they enter the incubation phase. The third and final discipline is scaling. In this stage, companies must ask and answer critical business questions, such as does the idea have the potential to grow into a successful business and provide great returns?
The Importance of Evidence-Based Validation: When companies venture beyond their core business, the failure rates can escalate. That means they need to test quickly before too much time and money are invested into a pursuit. Only through this process can they gain a qualitative understanding of the business, the users, and the customers to know if they have a scalable solution that can be built into a profitable business.
Understanding Successful Business Models for Innovation: Leading companies such as Amazon and Bosch have successfully developed and scaled their businesses through the three disciplines of innovation. For instance, Amazon has developed a system that encourages individuals to explore new ideas and a process that enables people to submit their ideas. For an idea to move forward, it has to provide a differentiated customer experience (i.e., delight the customer), has the potential to grow into a large business, and provide returns on invested capital.