Innovation has become synonymous with business growth. Yet, research consistently shows that established businesses that have innovated in their core markets in the past will struggle to become innovative again. Businesses underestimate the effort required to build innovation capabilities; sales of new products stall, penetrating new markets is difficult, and success with innovation is elusive.
In contrast, there are also companies with the rare capability to innovate time and time again. In the past 30 years, we have researched how businesses have used innovation to boost growth. Consider AB Ludvig Svensson, a Swedish manufacturer of specialist screens for greenhouses, which faced strong competition from Asian copycat products. Now, it has the capability to identify customer needs, create new markets, and segment existing markets in novel ways (see box case study). Another example from our research is
