The SCALE formula and the Lean Scaleup
Frank Mattes
Helping Heads of Innovation, Scaling-Up, and Business Incubator Units Build New Growth | 3x Author | Award-Winning Thought Leader | HBR Advisory Council Member | 100+ Companies Advised
This is the second article in an article series about excellence in the early stages of new business-building. Please find the first part, which outlines our mission and who we are, here. This post shows you the key formula for success and the framework that helps you to ensure that your innovation is set up for success.
To succeed in innovation, the company must make sure that
The formula for success
When we walk our clients through this thinking, we usually condense the main thoughts into one easy-to-memorize formula. For building new sizable and profitable businesses, the formula is:
The letters in this formula spell out as follows.
Success in building a new business from innovation is the product of the four factors C, A, L, and E. If there is a failure in one of these factors, there will be no success. All four boxes need to be ticked to create a sizable and profitable business. No factor can over-compensate for failure in another one. Excellence in engineering does not over-compensate for having wrong assumptions.
New-business building initiatives rarely fail because the underlying products do not work. When they fail, it is more often because the number of customers who are willing to buy the product at the right price, at the right time and in sufficient nThe umbers, is tToo small. Very often, the root cause is guessing how customers think and how they will behave, without bothering to check with them – an ‘A failure’ in the terminology of the SCALE formula.
This series of posts shows you how to avoid C- and A-failures in the early stages of out-of-the-box innovation.
The Lean Scaleup
We build on a solid, battle-proven foundation. Together with more than 20 industry-leading companies and two globally leading business schools, Frank co-created a Best Practice framework to solve one of corporate innovation’s biggest problems: how to create new businesses in parallel to running the established business.
The framework is called the Lean Scaleup. It has helped companies from industries as diverse as Oil & Gas, MedTech, Automotive, Software, Pharma and Industrial Services to get better in new-business-building. The next edition of the framework is currently being co-created by more than 100 corporate practitioners and half a dozen business schools and will be published later this year.
The framework’s Best Practices guide the corporate innovator how to create a solid foundation for a new business in the corporate context, with scalability built in right from the start. The Lean Scaleup brings six new, big ideas to the world.
Six big ideas
What comes next
We have mapped out an 8-part series that provides you with the insights into excellence in early-stage new-business building. Issues that we plan to cover comprise, for example:
We need your backing
We are innovators like you are. Hence, we want to create only the things that your readers need and want. To paraphrase Ash Maurya, life is too short to create content that nobody reads.
So please show us that you support your ambition. Repost and reshare this post. Tag your business friends and colleagues that should read this as well. Let us know which of the topics above are of particular interest – or which other ones you want us to consider.
Strategy & Innovation Advisory | Palladium Execution Premium Process (XPP) Accredited | BSI Balanced Scorecard Master Professional (BSMP) | Business Model Innovation | Strategic KPIs | OKR Accredited | OGSM Design??
1 年Looking forward to reading your insights on the formula for innovation success and the Lean Scaleup.