Mastering creative destruction : a holistic approach including business model innovation will increase the odds for gaining competitive advantages and achieving a more successful innovation performance

Abstract

Abstract According to international articles more than 80 % of innovation projects are failing. Despite of dedicated strategies, huge financial efforts and even external consulting most companies are not very successful in commercializing their inventions. This innovation performance problem is usually not due to a lack of good ideas, but is more a result of poor leadership, missing holistic approach, lack of a profitable business model and inflexible handling of internal and external resistance-to-change issues. The objective is to find evidence for the thesis that instead of a product-only focus a holistic approach including the rather untested topic of business model innovation will lead to a successful innovation project. In a first step this paper is doing a research, why so many innovation attempts are going wrong and if there is a pattern from the various reasons of failure. Obvious and not so obvious factors have been researched from papers, books, online blogs and PMBA E&I class content as well as from interviews with SME and start-ups and from the Master Thesis author-s own practical experiences. The second part of the thesis is dealing with the question, if firms are motivated to deal with the topic of Business Model innovation and if firms already have sufficient knowledge to explore BMI for gaining or regaining additional competitive advantages. Based on literature research and interviews with SME and start-ups three known BMI concepts are evaluated and ranked upon criterias such as usability and effectiveness. Using a problem-based learning approach one result of this paper is the identification of the four most important innovation success drivers and an actionable framework for the successful navigation of an innovation project. Another result will be a recommended five-step process for business model innovation plus some useful tools for each of these process steps. Working on innovation will never be risk-free and success will hardly be achieved with a pure text-book approach. The results of this paper illustrate that an approach and frameworks which are structured, holistic and customer value based, but at the same time also flexible and open for experimentation and iterations, will help to gain competitive advantages and therefore can significantly increase the odds for a successful innovation project.