Strategic and organizational factors are what separate successful big-company innovators from the rest of the field. Innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses.

Choose

Fresh, creative insights are invaluable, but in our experience, many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale. At bigger companies, this can be particularly problematic during market discontinuities, when supporting the next wave of growth may seem too risky, at least until competitive dynamics force painful changes.

Discover

Innovation resources also require actionable and differentiated insights the kind that excites customers and brings new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? A genius is always an appealing approach if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields other approaches besides exceptional creativity.

The insight-discovery process, which extends beyond a company’s boundaries to include insight-generating partnerships, is the lifeblood of innovation. We won’t belabor the matter here, though, because it’s already the subject of countless articles and books.

Accelerate

Virulent antibodies undermine innovation resources at many large companies. Cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies simply get in the way of their own attempts to innovate. A surprising number of impressive innovations from companies were actually the fruit of their mavericks, who succeeded in bypassing their early-approval processes.

Scale

Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work on a global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensure that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it. The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence.

Extend

In the space of only a few years, companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation resources require external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries. Successful innovators achieve significant multiples for every dollar invested in innovation by accessing the skills and talents of others. In this way, they speed up innovation and uncover new ways to create value for their customers and ecosystem partners.