Innovation at the core of the Corporate Strategy Office

As explained in a recent publication from Deloitte: "Developing strategic foresight and coordinating planning activities more effectively, are new functions beyond the financially oriented mechanics of the annual budgeting process. Strategy has evolved as a corporate function and currently plays a multitude of roles, particularly in helping the organization see around the corner, navigate uncertainty, and position the business to win in a world of accelerated change."

The Strategy Office is in charge of addressing its organization’s most critical strategic capability gap: "The ability to generate disruptive growth in a fast-changing market environment.

The Strategy Office is positioned to help its organization to meet the disruptive growth challenge by architecting a systemic competence, that promotes a more entrepreneurial mindset, novel ways of sensing emerging trends and opportunities, higher rate of experimentation, greater risk tolerance, better calibrated expectations, well-aligned funding and incentives, and creation of an expanded ecosystem of partners." In our case it is an Innovation Lab for internal venture incubation.

The Strategy Office need also to adopt more agility in Strategic planning that is well reflected by system thinking and scenario analysis: "A new standard is needed to catch the speed with which the market is moving and likely needs to be reinvented. Most Strategy executives report are obsoletes in the 3–4 months that it is required to complete. Scenario planning that was introduced by Pierre Wack in the 80's is a great technique to create optionality into an organization’s strategy. The Strategy Office is arming it with a playbook to quickly react to changes in market conditions or in competitive dynamics to help “future proof” the company's strategy."

The Strategy Office overarching the Innovation Lab activities to tackle growing corporate challenges: "Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous & Disruption have become the norm in today’s business world. The ability to navigate these undercurrents and to succeed in these conditions are becoming critical sources of competitive advantage."