The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth)

by Clayton

case study of the Big Idea Group (BIG), a company that identifies, develops, and markets ideas for new toys.13 After quoting a senior executive of a multibillion-dollar toy company who complained that there have been no exciting new toy ideas for years, the case then chronicles how BIG attacks this problem—or rather, this opportunity. BIG invites mothers, children, tinkerers, and retirees who have ideas for new toys to attend “Big Idea Hunts,” which it convenes in locations across the country. These guests present their ideas to a panel of experts whose intuition BIG executives have come to trust. When the panel sees a good idea, BIG licenses it from the inventor and over the next several months shapes the idea into a business plan with a working prototype that they believe will sell. BIG then licenses the product to a toy company, which produces and markets it through its own channels. The company has been extraordinarily successful at finding, developing, and deploying into the market a sequence of truly exciting growth products. How can there be such a flowering of high-potential new product opportunities in BIG’s system, and such a dearth of opportunities in the large toy company? In discussing the case, students often suggest that the product developers in the toy company just aren’t as creative, or that the executives of the major company are just too risk averse. If these diagnoses were true, the company would simply need to find more creative managers who could thi...