Innovation
Innovation has become a critical component of every community’s economic resilience and its ability to adapt to global trends and disruptions. This same principle applies to organizations and entrepreneurs alike trying to create viable platforms. In an age where technological advancements are so rapid, this necessity is even more evident. As a reference point, computation power has grown more than 1000x each decade since the year 2000 alone, allowing scientific breakthroughs and discoveries to accelerate significantly. This enabled several projects to advance at a pace unseen in history. The human genome mapping, as an example, went from 30k base pairs sequenced as of 2008 to 33.3 million by 2015. But in reality, any major innovations remain theoretical until paired with winning sustainable commercialization and growth strategies that are executed properly, transforming such effort into a carefully designed and commercially viable business model.
Corporations, governments, academic institutions, and aspiring entrepreneurs are all trying to understand global changes in areas such as consumer behavior, business models, supply chains, human capital, and operations, in order to figure out ways to stay relevant, competitive, and sustainable. Within every business success, there is usually an “innovation” component that encompasses both the needs of daily life and societal issues at large. Such efforts have become imperative for sustainable growth and economic competitiveness. At their core, innovation strategies comprise other concepts such as internationalization (how to make sense of the world markets and expand a group’s connectivity to the rest of the global marketplace), collaboration (how to generate value within cross-disciplinary teams), and governance (how to unleash internal capabilities and measure correct metrics to generate successful outcomes).
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shattered several longstanding business beliefs and practices and enabled an unprecedented acceleration in business model innovations across industries, the most apparent aspect of which is probably the physical office space conundrum. For corporations, governments, academic institutions, and entrepreneurs alike, such a transformative undertaking requires increased collaboration, a broader worldview, and the cultivation of an environment conducive to creativity, risk tolerance, and flexibility/adaptability, all while respecting internal controls, policies, and due process. In today’s world, we find cities, organizations, and research institutions to have all become venues for the development of a strong knowledge base of the future (the knowledge economy).
Our experience confirms that such innovation efforts come to exist deliberately, not coincidentally. While hundreds of success stories have emerged in recent years, we consistently find that the most successful have been built by measured, well-thought-out efforts.
At Lodestone Advisory Group, we support our clients in thinking through the ever-changing dynamics in the world of business; we also help them devise and execute strategies to address complex business issues to compete in a global marketplace. Over the years, among several other things that we take pride in accomplishing, we have supported our partners in designing and launching international accelerators and innovation hubs, we have advised and invested in successful start-ups and supported them in their quest for sustainable growth, we have advised on public-private partnerships that led to successful commercialization efforts, we have supported business turnaround/transformation efforts, and we have advised on transactions and collaborations between large organizations and small businesses providing small businesses with access to global resources and large organizations with long-term value creation opportunities. To learn more, please follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter and feel free to contact us at info@lodestoneadvisory.com or reach out to one of our team members.