Does your high-growth company need to innovate?

It’s easy to be blinded by short-term rapid growth and ignore the innovation happening around you. It’s essential that the leadership team has the foresight to understand that they don’t want to be the next Yahoo!

One of the challenges of a high growth industry is that your competitors are growing at the same rapid rate. This is precisely the moment at which you should be experimenting and exploring to identify the new disruptors. There is a tendency to focus on the core to maximise growth and returns while competing fiercely. This is great, but how to you prevent that blind-side disruption coming at you two years from now? The opportunity is now to drive your innovation agenda aggressively.

Have the foresight to understand that you’re growing like crazy, but ask “Given the exponential growth in disruptive technology and new business models, what do the business, our industry and adjacent industries look like in three years’ time?”
and my favourite
“How would Google, with near-infinite resources, kill our business in the next two years?”
It’s quite powerful. And sobering.

Create a team to kill your own business

How do you answer these questions? Easy.

Set aside some of those high-growth derived profits for a well-resourced team and task them to scour the globe for ideas, startups, competitors and talent with the objective of finding out how to kill or disrupt your own business.

Better to discover for yourself, and act quickly, than wait for it to happen to you. And it will.