The Breakthrough Brigade
Dare to be a breakthrough growth leader.
Unlocking growth through innovation
By embracing innovation, organisations can successfully generate, commercialise, and scale high potential ideas and turn them into revenue-generating opportunities, fast.
Innovation is about more than financial growth. Innovative thinking benefits individuals and society, approaching old problems in new ways while developing novel solutions to critical questions.
From incremental to breakthrough innovation
Against a backdrop of increased economic uncertainty, urgent sustainability imperatives, and a rapidly evolving set of competitors, innovation is more important than ever.
To turn opportunities into growth, organisations need to shift from incremental to breakthrough innovation. This means moving beyond gradual improvements to totally reimagine products, services and modes of delivery. With breakthrough innovation, organisations can move further, faster.
How we can help
To understand the blockers and benefits of breakthrough innovation, we surveyed over 500 C-suite decision makers and leaders at large enterprises across geographies and industry sectors.
While almost half (42%) of respondents say they need breakthrough innovation to survive, and three quarters (74%) saying breakthrough innovation has become more important in the last few years, consistently achieving it is hard. We found that 73% continue to prioritise efficiency improvements and cost reduction over breakthrough innovation.
Innovation as a process
Our research revealed that a key cohort of respondents – the ‘Breakthrough Brigade’ – were able to achieve and sustain breakthrough innovation through five key steps:
- Dare to be a breakthrough growth leader.
- Invest in experimentation.
- Ready your rebels.
- Build an innovation engine.
- Nail the idea, scale the idea.
These organisations have stolen a march on the ‘incrementalists’ – those locked in a cycle of delivering small, continuous changes to existing core products and services, with reduced growth opportunities.
Integrating an innovation strategy
Aligning organisational strategy with innovation goals enables organisations to quickly identify high performing ideas, experiment effectively, and reposition innovation as a constant process of growth.
Organisations who are best at breakthrough innovation invest in and empower their people, curating a culture that makes innovation part of everyone's job. When individuals adopt an experimental mindset, they share ideas openly without fear of failure – a key part of the innovation process.
Breakthrough innovation also takes bravery. This isn’t just the preserve of small start-ups. We found that 78 percent of the Breakthrough Brigade generate at least £10 billion in annual revenue with one quarter generating over £50 billion, debunking the myth that large organisations struggle to create the culture and processes needed to deliver breakthrough innovation.
Enhance your innovation journey
We help our clients shape the right strategy, systems, and structure required to develop robust, impactful products and services that can withstand unprecedented change.
We’re the only firm able to deliver full, end-to-end innovation under one roof, combining the expertise of our strategists, innovators, scientists, engineers, designers, digital technologists and business transformation leaders to help our clients move from incremental to breakthrough innovation.
Client stories
Special reports
Explore more
