Behind the scenes: from thought-leadership to growing a SaaS business
"Success in innovation requires two key elements," explains Alex Osterwalder, Strategyzer's co-founder. "First, finding a value proposition that customers care about, and second, embedding that in a business model that can scale profitably." This journey involves constant iteration between these two elements until you find the right combination. The process isn't linear – it requires cycling through design, testing, and refinement until you discover what truly works.
Our own path has involved three significant pivots.
Building off the success of The Business Model Canvas, we created an iPad app allowing anyone to create digital visions of their Business Model Canvas. While the app found success in the App Store, we recognised that a $30 one-time transaction model was very difficult to scale and build recurring revenue. This led to another significant pivot toward a web platform with higher price points. However, we encountered both technical feasibility challenges and user retention issues – while customers loved using the platform, it wasn't addressing a recurring need impacting the customer lifetime value.
Alex Osterwalder, the co-founder of Strategyzer and author of books such as Business Model Generation.
The breakthrough came when we realized customers weren't primarily interested in software – they wanted the complete package of processes, slides, and methodologies. This led to our latest pivot, combining software, IP and content to build programs dedicated to achieving specific innovation outcomes. Whether it is to business results, capability building or improving the quality of ideas in your organization. In other words, we were willing to kill a business that was bringing in some money but couldn't scale, rather than letting it continue and cannibalize our programs.
That is when our program licenses started to take off. Since then, we were able to double our revenues every quarter for 2024. You can see a new vision emerging: Strategyzer is not simply a platform business, we transform companies with outcome oriented programs. This insight led us to bundle everything as programs on our platform, attracting both large companies wanting to scale innovation processes and smaller organisations seeking world-class innovation methodologies. Today, we're moving toward enabling companies to design and run their own innovation programs with their coaches on the Strategyzer platform.
Managing the Explore-Exploit tension
Tendayi Viki, author and innovation expert, highlights the core challenge many organisations face: balancing existing business operations with exploring new opportunities. "The existing business is insatiable," he notes. "There's always more to do, and it provides just enough good money to keep you interested and distracted from investing sufficient attention in exploring new opportunities." This reality creates what one participant aptly described as "the Pac-Man of resources"—constantly consuming attention and energy that could be directed toward future growth.
This Explore-Exploit tension manifests in three key areas:
- Resource allocation: The existing business consistently demands attention and resources, making it challenging to invest in future opportunities. Every client email, service delivery issue, or operational challenge pulls focus from innovation initiatives.
- Product design: The familiarity of improving existing products can overshadow the need to innovate for the future. The comfort and immediate feedback of enhancing current offerings often creates resistance to exploring new, unproven directions.
- Sales and marketing: Sales teams focused on hitting current targets may struggle with the experimental nature of new value propositions. The pressure to meet quarterly goals can conflict with the need to run experiments and risk failure while building new value propositions.
Resolving the tensions
Our experience has led to several key insights for managing these challenges:
- Form dedicated exploration teams: Establish specific teams focused on building new value propositions and business models. While the entire organization may need to rally around new initiatives occasionally, having a dedicated team maintains consistent focus on future opportunities.
- Ensure leadership buy-in: Invest time in creating alignment around the transformation vision. As Tendayi shares, even innovation thought leaders need convincing—it took a half-day session in Nashville to align on the platform transformation strategy.
- Create transparency: Maintain clear communication about the transformation process across the organisation. As Carol Hill emphasizes, ensuring everyone knows about new developments and iterations is crucial when building something new while still selling existing offerings.
- Balanced integration: Find the right balance between separation and integration of new initiatives. As Alex notes, "Companies tend to make the mistake of being either too separate or too integrated." The key is maintaining enough distance for innovation while ensuring alignment with organizational vision.
The evolution of Strategyzer’s Innovation Management Platform
Kurt Bostelaar demonstrates how our platform has evolved to address these challenges:
From coach as guide to platform as guide: We've embedded guidance directly into the platform, making innovation processes more accessible and scalable. Instead of requiring coaches to navigate resources, the platform now provides sequential timelines, guided activities, and clear prompts that enable even new innovation coaches to lead effectively.
The team timeline the average user will see. Everything you need, in one place.
From visual workspaces to data-powered workflows: We've transformed static visual workspaces into efficient, data-powered workflows. This evolution enables automated analysis of customer interviews, streamlined reporting, and significant time savings for teams working on innovation projects.
A preview of the new way to conduct a guided customer interview, so you can focus on what matters.
An example of our presentation templates populated with your real data to save you time.
From manual progress management to automated coach dashboards: We've replaced endless email chains and manual progress check-ins with automated dashboards that track program completion, e-learning progress, and business model development. This provides real-time visibility into team progress and upcoming activities.
The Coach dashboard will be the go-to place for those managing multiple teams.
Moving forward
Innovation is a journey that requires both vision and practical execution. Our own transformation story demonstrates the challenges and opportunities in scaling innovation capabilities. As your trusted guide to innovation that delivers growth, Strategyzer continues to evolve our platform and methodologies to help organisations navigate this challenging landscape.
Ready to transform how your organisation approaches innovation? Contact us to learn more about our Innovation Management Platform and how we can guide you on your journey.
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