The entrepreneur’s go-to-market innovation strategy: towards a decision-analytic framework and a road mapping process to create radically successful businesses driving spectacular growth and profitability

Abstract

It is well known that 90 percent of all new ventures fail partly because they often lack vital resources, must compete against established companies but have little or no business acumen with which to compete and drive spectacular growth and profitability. Thus, just one-out-of-ten start-ups grow into successful, sustained enterprises. Although the academic literature attributes such sustained growth to innovative approaches for inducing transformative change, very few studies have attempted to address the five main components of strategic innovation management (strategic planning, business model innovation, marketing management, product innovation, and financial planning) within a single research framework. Building on insights from a systematic review of strategy and innovation management literature, this paper seeks to fill this important gap in the literature by introducing a decision-analytic framework for road mapping a go-to-market innovation strategy, comprising of well tightly integrated elements of strategy, business model innovation, marketing management, product innovation, and financial planning that mutually support each other as a system. The framework and its corresponding road mapping process create powerful alignment mechanisms to systematically map and analyse the underlying processes driving business performance and develop game-changing business plans to reshape industries, transform value chains, and drive spectacular growth and profitability.

RÉSUMÉ

Il est bien connu que 90% de toutes les nouvelles entreprises échouent en partie parce qu’elles manquent souvent de ressources vitales, qu’elles doivent concurrencer des entreprises établies, mais qu’elles n’ont que peu ou pas d’antécédents avec lesquels rivaliser et lever des capitaux. Aussi, seule une start-up sur dix devient-elle une entreprise prospère et durable. Bien que la littérature académique attribue une telle croissance soutenue aux approches innovantes, censées susciter un changement transformateur, très peu d’études ont tenté d’aborder les cinq composantes principales de la gestion stratégique de l’innovation (planification stratégique, innovation de modèle commercial, gestion du marketing, innovation de produit et planification financière) dans un cadre de recherche unique. S’appuyant sur les enseignements tirés d’une revue systématique de la littérature sur la stratégie et l’innovation, cet article cherche à combler cette lacune importante en introduisant un cadre d’analyse décisionnelle ayant pour objectif l’établissement d’une feuille de route pour une stratégie d’innovation en matière de commercialisation, comprenant des éléments fortement intégrés de stratégie, d’innovation de modèle commercial, de gestion du marketing, d’innovation de produit et de planification financière, qui se soutiennent mutuellement en tant que système. Ce cadre, de même que son processus correspondant d’établissement de feuille de route, créent des mécanismes puissants d’alignement permettant de cartographier et d’analyser de façon systématique les processus sous-jacents qui déterminent les performances commerciales, et d’élaborer des plans d’entreprise qui changent la donne pour le remodelage des industries, la transformation des chaînes de valeurs et la génération d’une croissance et d’une rentabilité spectaculaires.

Keywords:

• Entrepreneurship
• go-to-market innovation strategies
• game-changing business plans
• business model innovation
• product innovation
• marketing management
• financial planning

MOTS-CLÉS:

• entrepreneuriat
• stratégies d’innovation de commercialisation
• plans d’entreprise révolutionnaires
• modèle commercial et innovation de produit
• gestion du marketing et planification financière

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported through the Climate Research for Development (CR4D) Postdoctoral Fellowship [Grant number CR4D-19-05] implemented by the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) in partnership with the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID), Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) programme and the African Climate Policy Center (ACPC) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Statements made and views expressed in this work are solely the responsibility of the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Anderson Gwanyebit Kehbila

Anderson Gwanyebit Kehbila is a Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Africa Centre and the Program Director of environment, climate and natural resources management at EcoXergy Solutions. His research interests lie with quantitative modeling and empirical analyses of low-carbon transitions, and conceptual modeling, decision-making processes, systems analysis as well as the nexus amongst technology, innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship to explore a central conundrum for an entrepreneur: bringing innovations to market.