Why Most Organisations Are Driving Business Innovation Wrong

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” — Michael Porter

In the pursuit of growth and innovation, many businesses today are seduced by the shimmer of new technologies — cloud computing, machine learning, blockchain. These are powerful tools, to be sure. But too often, they’re adopted not as solutions to pressing problems but as attempts to appear modern, competitive, or cutting-edge.

What gets lost in this process is clarity: clarity about what the business actually does, for whom, and why it matters. That clarity stems not from technology, but from the foundational ideas that define a company’s purpose, structure, and operations.

Here’s why anchoring your strategy in foundational ideas beats chasing trends — and how doing so can transform how you grow, innovate, and serve customers.

1. Core Concepts Reveal What You Truly Do

At the heart of every business is a handful of core concepts. For a logistics company, it might be shipment, inventory, and delivery promise. For a bank, it could be account, transaction, and risk. For a retailer, it might be customer, order, and product variant.

Identifying these concepts forces you to clarify what your business offers — not just in terms of features, but in terms of services and value. This acts like a compass: it helps you evaluate whether a new initiative aligns with what your business really does, or whether it’s just noise.

2. Friction Lives in Misaligned Concepts

When teams operate without shared concept definitions, things break. You may have five different definitions of “customer” across departments. One includes anonymous browsers; another counts only those with purchase history. One tracks geography; another tracks engagement scores.

These differences introduce friction. Data integration becomes complex. Services fail at boundaries. Customers get inconsistent experiences. When you standardise core concepts, you remove these invisible sources of cost and complexity.

3. Concepts Can Be Valued and Prioritized

Once you identify your core concepts, you can start treating them as assets to be evaluated:

• How valuable is this concept to the customer?
• What does it cost us to maintain or implement this concept well?
• How much innovation or differentiation is possible around it?

For example, in a ride-share business, the concept of driver rating might be core — but if maintaining accurate ratings across jurisdictions is expensive and not mission-critical, it might not be worth optimising.

Conversely, if pickup ETA is both valuable and hard to get right, it may deserve strategic investment.

This helps leadership prioritise — not based on hype or departmental politics, but based on the real tradeoffs between customer value and operational complexity.

4. Consolidating Concepts Yields Leverage

Imagine a global enterprise with dozens of product lines. Each division might implement its own version of order, inventory, or discount rule. But under the hood, these often reflect the same fundamental business idea — just realised differently.

By consolidating these into unified, shared concepts:

• Customers get a uniform experience across web, mobile, and support channels.
• Product teams reduce redundant work.
• Integration becomes straightforward.
• Operational errors drop due to fewer schema mismatches and system translations.

It’s not just cleaner — it’s cheaper, faster, and more robust.

Final Thought: Let Technology Follow, Not Lead

There’s nothing wrong with the cloud, machine learning, or blockchain. But they should follow strategic clarity, not replace it.

When you invest in your core concepts — naming them, refining them, streamlining them — you create a solid foundation for growth. You align your people, your data, and your systems. You reduce waste. And when you finally do adopt new technologies, you do it with precision and purpose — not just to look modern, but to deliver enduring value.