Unsurprisingly, there are not many examples of  companies disrupting themselves, primarily because it sounds like a counter-intuitive thing to do. This is what’s described as the innovator’s dilemma.

‘Why would a company create a competing product to its own business? The answer is simple – survival’

Large companies are typically poor innovators; corporate systems are designed to maintain the status quo. Employees are incentivised to simply sell more products through well- known sales and distribution channels. Some companies excel at “sustaining innovations” – driving internal R&D programs where significant resources are spent on building new products to distribute to existing customers. Sustaining Innovations maintains company growth, but does not protect the company from new agile entrants that can efficiently take massive market share seemingly overnight.

Increasingly, corporates are becoming aware of this threat. The question is what to do about it. Slingshot has engaged with many corporates in the last five years and most have some form of internal sustaining innovation program. However, unless your company is born with an innovation culture (e.g Google, Apple) internal innovation is hard, corporate culture (DNA) and middle management headwinds (Antibodies) means that in reality, most corporate innovation programs either produce little or are slow and expensive to run.

Slingshot offers a new approach – Slingshot is changing the way large companies innovate.