Open Strategy

How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Why are some of the world’s most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It’s not because they hire a new CEO or expensive consultants but rather because these pioneering companies have adopted a new way of strategizing. Instead of keeping strategic deliberations within the C-Suite, they open up strategic initiatives to a diverse group of stakeholders—front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Open Strategy presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in this groundbreaking approach to strategy.             The authors—business-strategy experts from both academia and management consulting—introduce tools for each of the three stages of strategy-making: idea generation, plan formulation, and implementation. These are digital tools (including strategy contests), which allow the widest participation; hybrid digital/in-person tools (including a “nightmare competitor challenge”); a workshop tool that gamifies the business model development process; and tools that help companies implement and sustain open strategy efforts. Open strategy has an astonishing track record: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. This book offers a roadmap for this kind of success.

Christian Stadler is Professor of Strategic Management at Warwick Business School at Warwick University. Julia Hautz is Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Innsbruck. Kurt Matzler is Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Innsbruck, Academic Director of the Executive MBA program at MCI in Innsbruck, and Partner at the international management consulting firm IMP. Stephan Friedrich von den Eichen is Managing Partner at IMP and Professor of Business Model Innovation at the University of Bremen.

Foreword by Gary Hamel ix Series Foreword xvii Introduction: Win with Open Strategy xix 1 Traditional Strategy Come Undone 1 2 Are You Truly Ready to Open Up? 21 3 Design Your Open Strategy Process 41 4 Tweak Your Open Strategy Initiative to Allow for Secrecy 59 5 Harness the Wisdom of Crowds 75 6 Peer into the Future 97 7 Disrupt Yourself before Others Do 121 8 Develop Killer Business Models 145 9 Use the Crowd to Choose Better Strategies 163 10 Execute Better 185 Epilogue 205 Appendix A: Recommended Reading 211 Appendix B: The IMP Story 213 Notes 215 Index 251