Why good businesses struggle to innovate - and how we help them get out of their own way
Here’s an awkward truth about business innovation: the more successful a company becomes, the better it gets at doing what it already does. This is excellent news for the quarterly numbers, but less excellent news for the next big idea.
Established businesses have customers to serve, targets to hit, processes to follow and plenty of sensible reasons not to rock the boat. So when someone proposes a fundamentally different product, business model or market, the idea gets measured against the world as it exists today. Then trimmed. Then revised. Then presented to a steering committee. By the time everyone’s comfortable, the breakthrough has become a minor improvement with a slide deck.
“By the time everyone’s comfortable, the breakthrough has become a minor improvement with a slide deck.”
At Fearlessly Frank, we help businesses escape that trap. We’re an innovation consultancy combining creative strategy, commercial thinking and hands-on entrepreneurial experience to uncover new opportunities for growth - and do something with them.
A Parallel Universe, with both feet on the ground
You can’t simply switch off business-as-usual. It’s the thing that pays the wages. But that doesn’t give it final say on ideas about the future.
That’s the thinking behind Parallel Universe™, our proprietary innovation process. We create space alongside day-to-day operations where the right people can question the rules, explore what comes next and develop ambitious ideas before today’s constraints flatten them.
This isn’t a suggestion box or a one-day workshop followed by six months of nothing. The aim is to bring stronger, sharper, commercially credible ideas back into the business - so tomorrow’s breakthrough becomes the new business-as-usual.
Our approach has 5 connected stages that are practical, adaptable and designed to get you somewhere:
1. Dig Deep - find the real problem
It’s surprisingly easy to spend a fortune solving the wrong problem.
We start by getting under the skin of the business: your customers, culture, people, products, capabilities, competitors and market dynamics. That means research, stakeholder interviews, customer insight, adjacent-market exploration and a healthy disrespect for the phrase “that’s just how we do things”.
We’re looking for the question nobody has asked, the assumption nobody has challenged or the overlooked asset hiding in plain sight. We also build leadership alignment around what innovation is actually supposed to achieve. If 10 senior people give 10 different answers, that’s a useful place to start.
The output: a clear challenge, shared priorities and a better brief for innovation.
2. Dream Big - explore the future before everyone else gets there
Following trends is fine, provided you’re happy arriving at the same place as everyone else.
Our Tectonics™ foresight tool looks beneath the headlines, examining the macro, meta and micro forces reshaping technology, culture, economics and consumer behaviour - and, crucially, what happens when those forces collide.
We use insight and foresight, future scenarios and creative entrepreneurial thinking to identify promising innovation territories: spaces for new products, services, experiences, revenue streams or entirely new business models.
Sometimes we bring in Nemesis™, a workshop that asks the uncomfortable question: if a ruthless new competitor were free of all your legacy constraints, how would they put you out of business? Define your ultimate nemesis – then become it.
The output: opportunities worth getting excited about and worth investigating commercially.
3. Create Change - make the big idea understandable
This is where ambitious possibilities become clear customer propositions, brand positioning, business models and tangible concepts. We turn complicated thinking into something customers can desire, teams can rally behind and decision-makers can evaluate.
That might mean a new service proposition, a different revenue model, a reimagined customer experience or a strategic story that finally makes the opportunity click. Our work creating TCL’s ‘Inspire Greatness’ brand positioning is one example of taking a complex challenge and making it meaningful to consumers.
The output: differentiated ideas with enough substance to discuss, test and sell in (without sanding off everything that made them interesting).
4. Make It Happen - stop admiring the idea
There is a particularly sad fate reserved for brilliant ideas: being approved, congratulated and quietly buried.
We help move concepts towards reality through product innovation consulting, business case development, prototyping and MVP development, commercial validation, partner identification, strategic roadmaps and go-to-market strategy. Where specialist capabilities are needed, we work with the right delivery partners.
The challenge is practical, but also creative: protect the original ambition while solving the decidedly unglamorous problems of execution. From our venture work on Sherpa to digital customer-experience work with Nissan, we’ve seen how much difference that continued involvement makes.
The output: a credible route from promising proposition to something people can actually use or buy.
5. Measure Progress - let reality have a vote
Breakthrough innovation involves uncertainty. If you know precisely how everything will turn out, you may not be pushing terribly hard.
But uncertainty is no excuse for vague success measures. We agree what progress looks like, test the assumptions that matter and learn quickly. Depending on the challenge, that might involve customer adoption, willingness to pay, revenue potential, experience metrics, experiment speed or the quality of the emerging opportunity pipeline.
Some ideas need more investment. Some need a rethink. Some deserve to be killed before they become expensive mistakes. All three can be progress.
The output: evidence, decisions and momentum, rather than another dashboard nobody opens.
The point of it all
A good corporate innovation strategy needs two things that don’t always enjoy each other’s company: creative ambition and commercial discipline.
Protect the core business, absolutely. Just don’t ask it to imagine the entire future from inside its current operating model.
We’ve applied this thinking with businesses including Cisco, Diageo and Nissan, adapting the work to everything from long-range strategic planning and business model innovation to new product and service development.
Each time, and under very different circumstances and corporate cultures, our tools and processes have allowed these companies to fearlessly pursue future growth opportunities and develop breakthrough ideas.
