Innovation Strategy on MYLES — Strategy & Innovation Consulting

Systematic Innovation in Enterprise Organizations

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Problem With Innovation in Large Organizations

An Austrian manufacturer of precision agricultural equipment invests 8% of annual revenue in R&D. The engineers are among the best in Europe. The patents are real. The product quality is demonstrably superior by any technical measure. And yet the company has been losing market share for four consecutive years to a competitor from Eastern Europe whose products are technically inferior by almost every specification.

Customer-Centric Innovation: Why Traditional Methods Fail

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Uncomfortable Arithmetic of Customer-Centric Innovation

Every company claims to be customer-centric. Every strategy presentation includes a slide titled “The Customer at the Center.” Every roadmap meeting features the phrase “we need to get closer to the customer.”

And yet, depending on which study you cite, somewhere between 70 and 95 percent of new products fail in the market.

If everyone is already customer-centric, why do so many innovations fail?

Innovation Workshop: Structure and Execution That Produces Results

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Post-It Problem

Close your eyes for a moment and picture a typical innovation workshop. Comfortable chairs, colored Post-its, whiteboards covered in clustered ideas. A facilitator in casual clothes says “there are no bad ideas.” By the end of the day, 147 Post-its cover the walls, participants are energized, and the CEO says “this was great — we should do this more often.”

Six weeks later: the Post-its are in a drawer. The 147 ideas were never prioritized. Nobody knows which ones address a genuine customer need. The daily routine has displaced the workshop energy.

Innovation Management in Large Enterprises: What Actually Works

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Organizational Immune System

Every large enterprise has an immune system. Not biological — organizational. This immune system is programmed to detect deviations from the status quo and neutralize them. It operates through budgeting processes, incentive structures, stage-gate procedures, governance bodies, and cultural norms that accumulated over decades.

The immune system is not malicious. It is useful. It protects the enterprise from uncontrolled change, from uncalculated risk, and from the chaos that would ensue if every manager pursued their own agenda simultaneously. Without this immune system, no large organization would function.

Design Thinking vs. Jobs to Be Done: What Works Better?

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Two Frameworks, One Question

Design thinking and Jobs to Be Done — both promise better products through better customer understanding. Both have prominent advocates, impressive client references, and substantial consulting communities built around them.

But they are fundamentally different in their logic, their methods, and what they actually produce. A product team that understands both can deploy them with precision. A product team that knows only one has blind spots.

Chinese Competition: Innovation as the Answer to Price Pressure

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Wrong Response to a Real Problem

In the last three years, I have sat in strategy sessions at half a dozen DACH industrial manufacturers where the agenda item was labeled something like “Chinese competition response strategy.” The conclusions reached in those meetings have been remarkably consistent, and remarkably misguided.

The typical response: cut costs, defend price, emphasize quality and reliability as differentiators, and hope that the regulatory environment in Europe will create enough friction to slow Chinese market penetration. Some companies add a slide about “innovation” to the deck — but when you look at what they mean by innovation, it is usually a feature roadmap that had already been planned before the competitive pressure appeared.

The Mechanical Engineer and the Innovator's Dilemma

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Best Engineers Build the Wrong Products

There is a particular kind of strategic failure that is almost exclusive to engineering-led companies, and it is both the most understandable and the most damaging. The best mechanical engineers in a company — the ones who genuinely understand their product domain — are the most resistant to the innovations that will eventually displace their products. This is not a paradox. It is the logical consequence of deep expertise applied to the wrong problem.

Innovation Consulting: When and Why to Engage External Help

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Industry That Oversells Itself

Innovation consulting is one of the few professional services categories where the product being sold is often the opposite of what is delivered. Firms sell breakthrough thinking and transformational capability. They frequently deliver frameworks, workshops, and recommendations that sit in a shared drive until the next strategy cycle.

I say this as someone who runs an innovation consulting firm. The industry has earned this skepticism, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging it before offering any guidance on how to make better use of external innovation expertise.

Agile Product Development with a Focus on Customer Outcomes

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Agile Without Outcomes Is Just Fast Wrong

The promise of agile product development was compelling: shorter cycles, faster feedback, less waste from building the wrong things. Two decades after the Agile Manifesto, most software product teams work in some variant of agile. A growing proportion of hardware and industrial product teams have adopted agile-inspired elements. And yet the failure rate for product development — the proportion of products that fail to achieve meaningful market adoption — has not improved materially.