LEAP | Emergent Innovation

LEAP qualifies an organisation to bring forth profound innovations. An innovation team realises an innovation project and integrates it into the organisation. What makes this approach special is that it creates innovations, which –despite their game-changing character– organically fit into the organisation. The LEAP process lasts 4 to 8 months and applies equally well to develop a new product, business model, service or organisational structure. In the course of this process the innovation team is empowered to autonomously apply LEAP in the organisation.

The innovation technology LEAP is based on Thomas Fundneider and Markus Peschl’s “approach to emergent innovation” and on C.O. Scharmer’s Theory-U (MIT). It is characterised by the answers to three questions:

LEAP is a tested, scaleable and repeatable process for the development of truly profound innovations. It is characterised by:

  1. short-cutting the process necessary for ranking and selecting promising ideas,
  2. qualifying a team of an organisation to use a specially defined path towards  the emergence of an innovation,
  3. integrating an innovation project into corporate strategy,
  4. maturing core competences and potentials throughout  the organisation, and
  5. presenting an innovation first to the organisation and then step-wise integrate it into the value chain.

Game-changing innovations

LEAP has its focus on game-changing or radical innovations, i.e. on the systematic and consistent transfer of ideas to substantially new offers, structures and processes. The result is thus a substantial change of a business model or an industry.

Hidden potentialities in the environment of many organisations lead, under certain circumstances, to fundamental changes in industries and thus attain strategic value. LEAP, through “thinking from the future”, qualifies to:

  1. view the strategic core of an organisation from completely different perspectives in various lights,
  2. identify and explore relevant potentialities and
  3. integrate them into corporate strategy.

Strategic meaning of LEAP

LEAP provides a path on which the domains of strategy and innovation are brought together and integrated. At the very start of the process there is a comprehensive dialogue on the core of the organisation in order to define strategy-related innovation issues that give innovation projects a strategic meaning.

LEAP renders the team capable of creating a spirit of interest in and readiness for substantial changes within the organisation and hence to become a multiplier for later autonomous application of the LEAP process.


The selection of members of the organisation for the team widens the scope for building new visions of entrepreneurship and innovation. Techniques such as dialogue, creating common intent, design thinking, perception, reflection, etc. play specific roles in combining individual and collective activities.  

 

Innovation from within

LEAP aims at long-term sustainable anchoring of the new. Innovations emerge organically from within the core of the organisation.