Company Fit is about evaluating how well your hypothesis for a new business, product or process fits with the priorities and capabilities or operational norms of your company’s core business. Those norms can be described in terms of your company’s Resources, Processes, and Priorities (or RPPs for short). Even veteran corporate innovators or senior leaders within a company can struggle to detect RPP misalignment risks or pinpoint where the most significant issues are lurking. If they can't identify or describe the problems, then they are unlikely to be able to prevent or fix them. If a project is a poor fit, no matter how compelling to the opportunity might be, if appropriate mitigating steps are not taken the project will likely eventually fail. Failure from Company Fit issues are not typically from one or two big show-stopper type issues, rather a continuous stream of small points of resistance or compromises that cumulatively undermine the competitiveness or value of the opportunity to the point that it is ultimately terminated.
One of the biggest challenges that large companies face when growing their business beyond their core is misalignment between the Strategic Priorities and Operational Norms of their core business and those required for the new opportunity. Failure to detect and mitigate these misalignments is one the biggest causes of failure for radical or disruptive innovation projects and new businesses or the organizations that foster them. By identifying potential Resource , Process, or Priority mis-alignment risks early, you can manage the risk. The assessment can inform whether you should continue to pursue the opportunity as defined, if you should adjust the governance model within which the opportunity is pursued, and where some of the specific areas of friction are likely to occur so that you can proactively deal with them.
In some cases, the evaluation may help identify that the new opportunity is really just not a good fit for the company, and you may be better off pursuing a different opportunity that’s better aligned, or you might choose to spin that project out and pursue it externally.
For projects that have reasonable alignment with resources and processes or operational capabilities, the evaluation can help you optimize where and how to pursue them. For instance, a project that is highly aligned on both operational capabilities and strategic priorities, it may best be pursued within and existing business group using you company’s standard product planning and development processes. If a project is well aligned operationally, but not with strategic priorities, it might be better pursued with a milestone-based investment strategy to incrementally building confidence and support while reducing risk.
