Innovation Growth Lab
Welcome to the world of Growth Labs, where organizations harness the power of collaboration, crowd intelligence, experimentation and design to drive innovations forward.
What is a growth Lab and why should you have one?
Let us explain in more detail what we mean with a Growth Lab. In simple terms, a growth lab is:
- A specific delivery model to realize your innovation initiatives.
- An inspirational physical (or virtual) place in your organization, in which to collaborate, ideate, and get your hands dirty.
- A place to explore, discover, validate, and build innovation opportunities for specific business needs and compelling use cases.
- An opportunity to experiment with internal innovation teams and carefully selected external partners.
- A strategic innovation hotbed that drives strategic growth initiatives, from cost reduction, new product development to enhancing user experience and business model transformation
- A formal collaboration space governed by an explicit contract between the innovation team and the business and guided by a supportive Growth Board
- A long-term, mandated commitment to innovation which safeguards sustainability and sufficiency of resources, including skilled staffing, adequate budget, and cutting-edge tools.
A Growth Lab is instrumental in the ideation and validation stages of your innovation process. It is a safe haven for innovators and allows innovations to be validated outside of the constraints of the business.
We already explained having a Growth Lab fast tracks your business’ growth. Here are the key considerations around creating a Growth Lab for your organization.
- Create a dedicated and secure space for experimentation, free from the constraints of corporate rules, regulations, controls, and procedures.
- Foster a distinct working environment that sets the Growth Lab apart from the rest of the organization, encouraging fresh perspectives and innovative thinking.
- Cultivate a unique culture and mindset within the Growth Lab, promoting creativity, risk-taking, and a pioneering spirit
- Embrace a multidisciplinary approach by assembling specialized teams within the Growth Lab, harnessing diverse expertise and perspectives for collaborative problem-solving.
- Empower employees to develop their skills as corporate innovators, providing opportunities for growth and learning within the dynamic environment of the Growth Lab
- Establish a powerful catalyst for driving change throughout your organization, utilizing the Growth Lab as a lever to introduce and implement transformative initiatives.
The Growth Lab is backed by the comprehensive innovation suite of our partner, Qmarkets.
Managing your innovation process as a core business process requires solid support with state-of-the-art systems. Qmarkets’ end-to-end innovation software fits the bill.
The Growth Lab Playbook
Create purpose-built environments which serve as catalysts for groundbreaking ideas.
KLM Technology Innovation
Setting up a new corporate technology innovation venturing organization called BlueLabs
The RevelX Corporate Venturing Program
Start small, start with the Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment
Whether you are new to the topic of corporate venturing or have years of experience, a good place to start is to participate with the free RevelX Corporate Venturing Assessment (CVRA).
The Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment allows you to measure how to stack up against the 25 best practices in corporate venturing.
Compare your organization with the high performers in our benchmark
Understand which areas can drive venturing performance and where to improve
Receive a personal report including customized recommendations, during a (virtual) 30 minutes meeting with one of our professionals.
Start with the Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment
Get out of the building to become more successful in innovative growth. Start the assessment and gain valuable insights in how to increase your overall innovation power.
RevelX Venturing Discovery Workshop
A great way to follow up your Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment is to engage in a customized 1- or 2-day Venturing Discovery workshop with your team.
In this workshop we pay attention to the why and what of corporate venturing, your business strategy, and innovation mix to achieve your long-term development goals.
We also address the how? Your current innovation practice and in particular your venturing capabilities. To measure your overall innovation performance, we make use of our proven Innovation Readiness Benchmark.
This workshop is especially designed for organizations who are new of relatively new to Corporate Venturing.
After the Venturing Discovery Workshop, you will get:
- Clear insights in specific improvement areas and venture opportunities
- Prioritization where to start with the highest pay off
- Action plan for change
The RevelX Search Process Modules
In the search process, the crux is to get ahead of everybody else in spotting valuable trends, startups and scaleups. Getting access to these is no easy task. Finding breakthrough technologies in the labs of research centres and universities is even more difficult.
Proper search implies research of everything out there. There are many sources and no single source covers all. In order to win you must be very proactive
RevelX offers two modules to improve your search process:
Advanced Scouting
Advanced scouring is aimed at widening the scope of your search process and improving the qualifying and vetting of potential partners.
- The starting point of the scouting process is your innovation strategy. For which specific use cases and or strategic challenges do you want to engage in corporate venturing?
- The next step is to scout a wide array of sources for potential corporate venturing opportunities or solutions
- The longlist will be narrowed down through a validation (qualifying and vetting) process into a shortlist of potentials.
- The potential candidates will be matched with the business and it’s specific challenges and requirements. First engagements are organized, with letters of intent (LOIs) as a result when the match is positive.
Our Advanced Scouting module has been closely developed with our technology partners.
Innovation Challenges
Where our Advanced Scouting module sets you up for proactive search, our Innovation Challenges module focusses on organizing campaigns and open innovation challenges around one or more specific innovation problems and strategic opportunities.
This module comes as a highly automated process that we organize in close cooperation with our innovation technology partner Qmarkets. Qmarkets is one of the top tier end-to-end software providers in the field of innovation and Open Innovation.
The RevelX Venturing Management Module
To become more successful in corporate venturing you must organize and manage for success!
This implies a well-structured corporate venturing management process. The basis for this process can be found in this Playbook, based on the best practices in the field.
It also calls for a standardized workflow, fitting with the organization’s systems and being agile enough to respond quickly to arising opportunities.
Based on your maturity level, this module will be broken down into the following deliverables:
Design
When your innovation strategy is clear, and you know what you want to achieve it is time to design the way to create success! In a design sprint workshop, we will jointly construct a continuous and efficient process for corporate venturing, including appropriate levels of automation.
Align
The corporate venturing process must be aligned with the business. Not as a stand-alone and one-off activity. It should be integrated with the company’s strategy and internal innovation processes, as one continuous process. Communication, and a proper governance structure (like a Growth Board) are key activities.
Implement
We configure the corporate venturing process and tooling to function within your organization. This means configuring the (automated) venturing platform and turning on the external sources for scouting and matching within your organization. We incorporate current corporate venturing workflows in the new process.
Run
In the run-phase RevelX performs three key activities:
- Optimize: RevelX optimizes the workflow during a specific period after completion
- Monitor: RevelX monitors (at a distance) and resolve issues and improve when necessary
- Outsource: RevelX can take over the corporate venturing workflow process, Corporate Venturing as a Service, based on (pre)defined KPIs and SLAs.
The RevelX Alliance Performance Module
It takes two to tango. Good Alliance management starts with alignment of individual (strategic) goals of the partners and congruence of business ethics, integrity, and mutual respect. The right fit.
Other essential ingredients are good communication, proper resources, the right systems and way of working. Partnership also needs corporate’s ownership at the right level and place, and alignment with the organization.
RevelX starts this module with our PULSE, our assessment that measures the heartbeat of your existing partnerships.
After the assessment, we will further develop this module together with the customer according to the maturity leven and needs of the organization.
Download the RevelX Corporate Venturing Playbook
In this RevelX Innovation playbook we introduce the concept of Corporate Venturing and how to be successful at it.
Corporate Venturing Readiness Assessment
Become best-in class in Corporate Venturing
Realizing growth through innovation is hard. Today, many organizations still rely heavily on their own capabilities. Instead, they must also get out of the building to become more successful in innovative growth. With this we mean to continuously tap into external networks, pro-actively searching and partnering with startups and scaleups to balance internal efforts.
A continuous link with the outside world is crucial to:
- Explore the trends that shape the future of your industry
- Find new emerging technologies and growth opportunities
- Discover attractive startups and scaleups for partnering
After all, no company, big or small, can do it alone in today’s world of autocatalytic change.
But current practice is poor
RevelX Innovation Readiness Benchmark shows that only 35% of the companies actively tap into external sources to fuel the innovation pipeline. And almost 70% of corporate venturing initiatives fail (IESE 2019 research). Furthermore, of the low innovation performers, 80% do not venture in the outside world.
of companies actively search into the outside world for innovation
of corporate venturing initiatives do not deliver as promised or simply fail
of low innovation performers do not venture externally
MIT research (2020) values startups as the key source (44%) for innovation in 2025.
Start increasing your Innovation power with Corporate Venturing!
The RevelX Corporate Venturing Assessment measures the venturing power of your organization against 25 corporate venturing best practices, which have been developed and adapted from independent research of the Rotterdam School of Management, and our own RevelX research.
- Compare your organization with the high performers in our benchmark
- Understand which areas can drive venturing performance and where to improve
- Receive a personal report including customized recommendations, during a (virtual) 30 minutes meeting with one of our professionals
Innovation Portfolio Management Workshops
“Portfolio management is the art of developing and successfully managing a roadmap of innovation projects that will enable you to deliver your innovation strategy”
Portfolio management includes a number of key activities
Project status and progress reporting
Tracking the performance of innovation projects on predefined KPIs and targets
Stage gate decision making
Approving the transition to the next phase of the innovation process, which can also lead to stopping or pivoting the project
Resource allocation to innovation projects
Making sure your innovation projects have sufficient budget and the right people available
Only 33% of companies report the (financial) performance of innovations
RevelX IRB research shows that only 33% of the companies in our benchmark closely monitor the performance of innovation projects on well-defined metrics. Only 35% of the companies have solid financial business cases for their innovation projects. Only 39% of the companies in our benchmark quickly stop with projects that shows no viability and only scale the viable ones. So, there is a lot of room for improvement.
Investing in innovation portfolio management pays off
of low performers is good at innovation portfolio management
of the average performers is good at innovation portfolio management
of the high performers is good at innovation portfolio management
Recent Accenture research (2020) confirms that companies who govern innovation portfolio extensively delivered up to 2x revenue / value growth compared to those following an ad-hoc approach to portfolio management
Start improving your Innovation Portfolio Management now and double your return on innovation. At RevelX we have successfully developed two types of approaches to support you in improving your Innovation Portfolio
Who
Organizations that want to develop a new portfolio management process
How
- Start from scratch with a ‘blank sheet of paper’ approach
- Evaluate ‘lessons learned’ from the past, pitfalls to avoid and the successes to enhance
- Get inspired by RevelX’ best practices, e.g, over 10 years of research, case studies in all sized of industries, metrics and tooling
Deliverables
New bespoke innovation portfolio process, including proper governance and decision making
Effort
2-3 days
Who
Medium to High performing organizations at innovation portfolio management who want to optimize their current portfolio management activities
How
- Will take your existing portfolio management process as a starting point
- Compare your existing process with our benchmarks, culminating in suggestions and advice for improvement by reviewing the overall framework
- Evaluate stage gate and discuss the objectives per stage, the criteria for passing gates, and the deliverables to be produced
- Establish performance metrics to measure success
- Compare innovation governance against our Growth Board best practice principles
Deliverables
New bespoke innovation portfolio process, including proper governance and decision making
Effort
2-3 days
Tools
- Innovation management
- Innovation portfolio framework
- Innovation funnel
- Innovation performance metrics
- Reporting structure
- Stage-gate decision making model
- Innovation governance
Innovation Portfolio Management Framework
Designing and strengthening your innovation portfolio makes a critical contribution to your overall innovation performance. Download here our Innovation Portfolio Management Framework.
Innovation Portfolio Management Playbook
This playbook to help you succeed in designing your innovation portfolio, managing your funnel, reporting on your innovation portfolio, and making stage-gate decisions.
"We were impressed by how quickly RevelX pin-pointed our blind spots and we were able to make major improvements thanks to their bold and thorough advice."
— Leanne van Almen & Martijn de Groot, Management Team, Radboudumc Health Innovation Labs
The added value of innovation portfolio management when well performed:
- Alignment between strategy and your innovation pipeline
- Balance portfolio between horizon 1, 2 and 3
- Focus scarce resource on priority projects to maximize value creation
- Create clarity for your innovation teams on what they need to do to make the next stage
- Shorten the time to market by setting targets for stage gates
- Less hobby horses and less dead horses in your portfolio
Disruption and Innovation Keynotes
Leading change starts with awareness and inspiration
- Learn what disruption means to your company, team, and industry
- Understand the sense of urgency to become an innovative organisation
- Learn what disruption is, what the leading indicators are, and how to respond to disruption
- Wake up the team and engage them in a collaborative approach to transform the company into a disruptor
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Matthijs Rosman
Matthijs Rosman is a seasoned corporate innovation specialist. He is a partner at RevelX, a Dutch growth consultancy firm specializing in business model innovation and digital transformation. Matthijs is a sought-after speaker and advisor in the fields of disruption, business model innovation, digital marketing transformation. In addition, he is an experienced startup and scale up mentor for tech startups and corporate ventures. Matthijs holds an MBA in International Business from Maastricht University in The Netherlands. He further specialized in Strategic Marketing and Competitive Strategy at Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut.
Topics: Disruption | Corporate Innovation | Driving Growth
Deliverables
A thought-provoking and inspirational keynote on disruption and innovation, customized for your team, organisation, and industry
Awareness of why you need to transform into a sustainable innovative company
Engagement with your team to start or improve your innovation journey
Perfect suitable for your company events, strategy sessions, or away days.
Frequently combined with our RevelX In-company Innovation Readiness Benchmark Survey and Ideation DisruptR Workshop
Steve Hilleard
CEO Office Products International
“At our annual European Forum and also our Global VIP Meeting, Matthijs Rosman of RevelX delivered a suburb thought-provoking keynote on disruption. The feedback from our members and customers was overwhelmingly positive and the sessions were rated the highest during the two events. The shared content is both inspiring as well as actionable. He definitely moved the needle.”
Ronald van het Hof
Managing Director at Woman on Wings
“For 15 CEOs (our business partners in India), Matthijs Rosman of RevelX has delivered a mind-changing online session on the key principles behind successful innovation. Very much needed in a time highly affected by COVID-19, creating a new sense of positivity that a crisis can also be turned into something good. The feedback from our partners was extremely positive and many requested a follow up session. We selected a group of CEOs who are highly motivated and inspired to take their companies to a next level with Matthijs’ support.”
Ready to get inspired?
In-Company Innovation Readiness Benchmark Quick Scan
Description
At RevelX, we believe that strategic innovation is the key to sustainable growth. Organizations that are successful innovators have the highest survival ratings and can brace themselves for disruption.
The RevelX Innovation Readiness Benchmark has been developed to assess the innovation power of organizations. It encompasses seven areas that drive innovation performance. Our benchmark also includes an assessment of the disruption risk.
More than 70 companies have already participated among which many industry leaders as well as start-ups and scale-ups. Follow this link for the open version of the benchmark where you can make a first assessment for yourself.
With the in-company version of our benchmark you will gain valuable insights into how managers from your organization rate your innovation power and the key improvement areas. This will only cost them 10 minutes of their time. The results from the benchmark are presented in a company specific report with advice from our innovation experts and discussed in a workshop.
Results
The Innovation Readiness Benchmark will give you
An in-depth understanding of your current strengths and weaknesses regarding innovation; and
A set of practical recommendations for strengthening your innovation power
Deliverables
Insight in how different units of groups of people within your organization rate your innovation power
Assessment of the disruption risk for your business and the drivers for disruption
Rating of your current innovation performance on 5 criteria
Rating of your innovation power on 35 innovation best practices identified by our innovation experts
A comparison of your innovation performance with the more than 70 companies in our benchmark
An action plan for strengthening your innovation power and performance
Target Audience
C-level, Director and senior management level across the organisation.
Host
Marc Douma
Your host will be Marc Douma, who has decades of experience in boosting growth with strategic innovation and is known for his inspirational style and not afraid to confront when needed. From his years of experience in boosting corporate innovation Marc has developed the in-company innovation readiness benchmark, which is a one-company specific version of the Innovation Readiness Benchmark study in which more than 70 leading companies have participated.
Want to Know More?
We partner with companies to outperform the market and realize double digit growth.
Value Proposition Workshop
Description
Realizing sustainable growth requires innovation.
Every business leader is aware of the importance of innovation. And at least product innovation is often on the corporate agenda. However, generating a truly innovative culture and realizing growth through business model innovation is a different ballgame.
Professionals at RevelX have decades of experience in actually realizing business model innovation. Awareness of the own company’s innovation readiness as well as fundamental insight of tested and proven structure of the innovation process, has often shown to be a wake-up call and start of a successful innovation journey.
Our innovation key-note has been shown to be inspirational and energizing in many different settings, from off-site board meetings to on stage events for large audiences. The keynote is typically held in one or two hours, but its content is very suitable for a half-day interactive session or even a day long innovation clinic.
We will tailor our keynote around a specific topic of interest. We are very open to your specific ideas.
Topics that we have covered in previous keynotes:
- DARE: the mindset for innovators. Check it out here!
- Innovation readiness. Check it out here!
- Successful innovation process. Highlighting four key ingredients to start embedding a successful innovation process: Creating a sense of urgency, Structure of the Innovation process, Growth lab principles and Organisational readiness.
Results
The innovation keynote directly benefits your organisation
You get inspired and energized with innovation best practices beyond the standard examples.
You learn how to structure your corporate ideation and validation process to develop impactful business model innovation concepts.
Get a feel for how to start develop a truly innovative culture to enable sustainable growth.
Deliverables
Inspired mindset and sense of urgency to start building an innovative culture
A practical starting point and shared framework to develop business model innovation in your organisation.
Target Audience
Board, Management team, Company Top 100 or similar.
Investment
1 day- Number of participants: 3-25
Want to Know More?
We partner with companies to outperform the market and realize double digit growth.
