Why The VISTERRA ® Group

• Strategy innovation is not a new concept. Start-up companies for decades have been entering old markets with new ideas and end up dominating them – Wal-Mart, Dell Computer, Federal Express, and many others.

Implementing strategy innovation in existing companies, however, is a new concept. But not for The Visterra Group. Since the 1980s, we have been successfully pioneering strategy innovation in large, existing corporations – 3M, Kodak, IBM Research, Hewlett-Packard, among others. We know what it takes to teach old dogs new tricks.

• As pioneers in strategy innovation, we have experimented with many different approaches to the strategy innovation process and have learned from each one. Here are some of the things we have learned:

- Successful new business opportunities are based on customer insights, market foresight, and/or business model innovations. Few companies currently have strong capabilities in these areas so they need to be generated.

- New business opportunities should be identified and created by internal, cross-functional teams. Team selection and its support structure should be carefully considered.

- Whereas strategic planning requires a heavy dose of logical, quantitative thinking skills, strategy innovation requires an exploratory mindset and a creative thinking process. Creating the right working environment for strategy innovation is crucial for success.

- The strategy innovation process in most established companies will encounter a series of institutional forces that could inadvertently create obstacles to its success. Steps should be taken to avoid these forces so that the new and the old can peacefully coexist.

- Strategic alignment with senior management and with the goals of the organization is the single most important element in determining the relevance of new business opportunities. To achieve this alignment, we have found that the identification of a company’s strategic frontier is most effective, making it the most critical element to the success of strategy innovation.

• Our process for strategy innovation is not a proprietary secret that we withhold until a client hires us. We wrote a book about it. Called The Power of Strategy Innovation, it is the first book on the market to identify a process for the creation of strategy innovation in corporations. It is filled with examples of how the process worked in a variety of companies – in the words of our clients.

• Most outside companies that work on corporate strategies are large, highly-priced, multi-layered organizations that take over the strategic development process of a company and deliver the results to senior management in a fat, three-ringed binder.

Our approach is different. We at The Visterra Group believe that people support what they help create. If you want your employees to embrace your company’s strategy, involve them in its creation. The Visterra Group will provide the guidance and coaching your internal team needs to create a portfolio of innovative new business opportunities. Give your people a chance to create your future.

And this coaching will not come from MBAs fresh out of school. With The Visterra Group, your team will work directly with company principals, sharing their decades of experience.