LEVERAGE STRATEGIC NOVELTY (SN) TO TRANSFORM AND DOMINATE YOUR MARKET

• Become an “outlier organization”: recognize huge opportunities in novelty, and act fast and first
• Listen for the tremors already building beneath your markets
• Learn from winning “outlier” business models, organizational forms, markets, products, and services

Today, the companies that rise rapidly to dominance are the outliers. They’re radically novel where it matters: whether in business models, products, services, or some other key driver of value. Strategic Innovation reveals how to think like these vanguard organizations–and become one of them.

You’ll discover how to borrow the lenses and insights of companies operating right at the edge of conventional industry dynamics and boundaries…where opportunities are underdefined, predictions unstable, and the greatest opportunities exist.

Using linked case studies and a proven three-step methodology, the authors guide you through uncovering Strategic Novelty (SN) with explosive potential…executing quickly… and learning and tweaking relentlessly to amplify your impact.

If you keep doing what everyone else is doing, you may succeed–but not greatly, and not for long. If you want to create, transform, and dominate your market, you need to think and act like an outlier. Learn how. Now. Before someone does it to you.

Right now, all around you, there’s an explosion of new business models, new product/service categories, and new organizational forms. It’s a veritable Cambrian Explosion of business life, led by outlier organizations you’ve never even heard of. Many will remain practically invisible to the incumbents in their markets…until they suddenly explode into dominance.

What do they share? A fundamental commitment to Strategic Novelty (SN). Now, in Strategic Innovation, leading innovation strategists Liisa Välikangas and Michael Gibbert show you how to leverage SN to become your industry’s winning disruptor.

You’ll master SN through case studies from leading outlier organizations in areas ranging from 3D printing to crowd financing and resource-constrained innovation. Each case is original, previously unpublished, and based at least in part on the authors’ direct experiences.

Through these cases, you’ll explore how each company’s story is playing out: sometimes in failure, but often in massive success. You’ll discover why incumbents rarely notice outliers in time, and how to keep it from happening to you. Perhaps most valuable of all, the authors help you extrapolate the likely impact of any novelty, so you can tell the difference between promising opportunities and those destined to fail.

The proven methodology for profiting from Strategic Novelty (SN)

Three steps + powerful tools to:

Identify the WOW

What excites you? Unsettles you? What does that mean? What does it say about you?

Execute the SO WHAT?

Choose and apply the strategic ideas most likely to enrich your organization

Amplify the OOMPH

Experiment, learn, and lead to maximize the impact of novelty

Michael Gibbert (Milan, Italy) is Professor of Marketing at the Institute for Marketing and Communication at Lugano University. His research interests include the effects of constraints on innovation; consumer behavior, and research methods. His research has appeared in publications ranging from Cognitive Science to the European Management Journal, MIT Sloan Management Review and Strategic Management Journal to The Wall Street Journal. In his researcher-practitioner collaboration, he has helped managers at Siemens, Henkel, Infineon, Infinity, Louisenthal, Lufthansa, and Mini unleash the value of Strategic Novelty (SN). He recently co-authored Using Thematic Thinking to Achieve Business Success, Growth, and Innovation.

Liisa Välikangas (Finland) is Professor of Innovation Management at Aalto University and Hanken School of Economics. She has been affiliated with Stanford, London Business School, Keio University (Japan), and IMD (Switzerland). Her research on innovation, strategy and organization has been published in Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Wall Street Journal, and other leading journals. She authored The Resilient Organization, How Adaptive Cultures Thrive Even When Strategy Fails. She is a board member of SCANCOR, the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research at Stanford University; Sanoma Foundation, dedicated to studying the future, freedom of speech and democracy; and Tekes, The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. She is also affiliated with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA.