Bosch: Scaling Large Company Innovation for Strategic Advantage

This case focuses on the Innovation Performance Management (IPM) methodology as a new approach whereby established and global companies, like Bosch, can use innovation to support strategic goals. It outlines the genesis of how Bosch developed and rolled out its two-phase Bosch’s Accelerator Program (BAP) between 2016 and 2020, in collaboration with University of California’s Berkeley Executive Education's Innovation Acceleration Group (IAG). IAG later spun out its IPM system and methodology as startup Hypershift Systems, a consultancy focused on building innovation capabilities for organizations. In contrast to other innovation trends, such as design thinking or lean management, IPM focuses on the operational execution by having several projects simultaneously in the innovation pipeline in order to achieve scale. Its success rests on the premise that companies cannot reliably 'pick' successful startup businesses to incubate, but that rather the 'winners' emerge as a result of testing many different business model ideas at scale, using validation to shut down most ideas early, and allowing ones with customer-validated potential to develop and emerge through iterative customer and product validation.