The index below includes terms that are frequently used in BRI's resource materials, the Growth Forge software, in the course of performing our services. They may often be used by, and in many cases, coined by other experts and academics working in the new business growth and innovation strategy domain. We started maintaining a collection of them here for the convenience of our clients.
An implementation approach that centers on acquiring an external company as the primary means of obtaining the capabilities needed to deliver the whole solution.
Products or businesses that are closely related both strategically and operationally to the organization's core business. Leverages significant operational capabilities of the core business and does not create any customer or channel conflicts with the core business.
Adjacent Innovation is a class of innovation project that expands from existing products or services into new markets, or brings new offerings to existing markets — leveraging something the business already has to reach beyond where it competes today. It carries more risk than Core Innovation and less than Disruptive Innovation, and is one of the three project classes used to define a portfolio mix. Adjacency is where many companies find their next leg of growth, but it depends on an honest read of which core strengths actually transfer to the new arena.
Ambidextrous leadership is the capacity of a leader to recognize the fundamental differences between exploratory and core businesses and to compartmentalize their leadership accordingly — applying discovery-oriented, uncertainty-tolerant judgment to new ventures while running the core for execution and efficiency. It is the human precondition for an ambidextrous organization: the structures only work if leadership can hold both modes at once.
An ambidextrous organization is one that can simultaneously exploit its established core business and explore new, uncertain ones — running each under the operating model it actually needs rather than forcing both into one. In practice that means institutionalizing tailored systems of governance for exploratory businesses, separating them structurally from the core, and establishing formal interfaces that let those exploratory businesses selectively draw on the core's capabilities — all held together by ambidextrous leadership able to compartmentalize between the two. The term was first named by Robert Duncan (1976) and developed into a management framework by Michael Tushman and Charles O'Reilly.
Stated or implied assumptions within a strategy hypothesis about the choices or actions that other value network actors will make. One of the three assumption types in the BRI Strategy Framework, alongside Strategy Choices and Uncertainties.
