Billable Consultants: 12
Offices: 1
Innosight's approach to management consulting is both innovative and disruptive, which is to say that the firm practices exactly what it preaches.
"Our model is not to continue to sell lots and lots of work to the same client over the next five years," says Innosight president Mark Johnson, who cofounded the firm with The Innovator's Dilemma author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in 2000. "We essentially try to put ourselves out of business with a client within a year or two, because we believe that our work for them will help us get into other companies."
The firm's 12 consultants provide educational and consulting services to SAP AG, Kodak, Lockheed Martin, Intel, the government of Singapore, and other clients to help them "make the discipline of innovation more predictable," notes Johnson, a former Booz Allen Hamilton consultant who met Christensen while earning his MBA at Harvard in the early 1990s.
Innosight was launched based on the success of Christensen's seminal book and other related books and articles he and Johnson authored, as well as the positive response to the innovation-themed seminars the two held through Harvard Business School Publishing.
Executives who attended those sessions learned about the principles of innovation, including the differences between sustaining and disruptive forms of innovation — and how those notions applied to their business. "We developed questions and exercises that made the principles as real as possible," Johnson recalls. "We wanted them to walk away knowing how to use these ideas to change how they ran their business from an innovation and growth perspective."
Many executives walked away wanting to know more, so Johnson and Christensen began conducting consulting engagements.
"The first step is to build a common language as a way to frame innovation," says Johnson. "Before you can begin solving problems, you need everyone speaking the same language."
Innosight consultants keep their approach to innovation on the tongues of top executives through a heavy course load of writing: case studies, industry-specific research reports, articles in top business reviews, training materials, and newsletters. The firm publishes the bimonthly newsletter Strategy & Innovation in conjunction with Harvard Business School Publishing and its own electronic newsletter, Innovators' Insight, every other week.
Aside from its executive-education and publishing activities, Innosight is a boutique management consulting firm whose specialty happens to be the discipline of innovation. "We really think from a general manager's perspective of how to manage innovation," says Johnson. "We don't focus only on product design, for example. We cover market understanding, technology management, and product-line planning. We think of innovation holistically."
The niche is attractive, Johnson believes, because the scale of Innosight's engagements, which typically last three to four months, does not appeal to big strategy firms that prefer larger-scale projects. "We're a theory-based consulting firm," Johnson says. "We can predict when an innovation is going to be successful from both a strategic and an organizational point of view, and when it's not."
Rather than collect large amounts of organizational data or conduct lengthy audits, Innosight goes in fairly quickly, Johnson says, and applies a four-part methodology that enables organizations to drive their own market growth and innovation.
Johnson expects to add five senior-level consultants (must have a passion for innovation and an ability to teach C-level students) during the coming year. Until an upstart disrupts Innosight's hold on its niche, that growth should continue.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.