INTRODUCTION
For more than thirty-five years, one of us (VG) has taught, written about, and consulted on the challenges of building a sustainable business by establishing disciplines that enable a continuously revitalized future. I learned that the main impediments to achieving such a future are often the all-consuming demands of the current core business. The work of the present thus drains energy, organizational attention, and investment from the kinds of breakthrough innovations that fuel new business opportunities. The stress from these everyday demands of the core business is a common ailment that greatly endangers many, if not most, enterprises.
Over these three-plus decades, I studied numerous strategy failures and a smaller number of inspiring recoveries and outright successes. From my observations, I distilled a framework that shows how businesses and their people can take concerted action in three time horizons at once:
Box 1: executing the present core business at peak efficiency
Box 2: avoiding the inhibiting traps of past success
Box 3: building a future day by day through breakthrough innovations
I wrote about this framework in the Harvard Business Review Press book titled The Three-Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation. In it, I describe how foresightful, disciplined businesses have mastered each of the three boxes and built a balanced portfolio of solutions that answer the challenges of ongoing self-renewal.
My coauthor, Manish Tangri, and I present The Three-Box Solution Playbook to help companies apply these ideas to drive business-model innovation (Box 3) and growth. Manish has spent more than fifteen years executing entrepreneurial innovation activities in Fortune 500 organizations such as Microsoft and Intel. His growth-focused experiences have spanned various corporate innovation life cycles: building new businesses organically; accessing innovation competencies through acquisitions, equity investments, or partnerships; and realigning efforts through divestures or shutdowns. These experiences, which include recognizing external trends and nonlinear shifts and amplifying them so that organizations can effectively create their future, were critical in developing this playbook.
Together, through this playbook, we’ll provide a scalable and repeatable process for creating your future while managing the present.
The Organization of the Playbook
We’ve organized The Three-Box Solution Playbook into three parts—ideation, incubation, and scale. These three parts mirror the innovation process that we call Box 3. Further exploring these ideas, chapters 1–9 in the book include three sections:
The first section describes the key concepts, terminology, and building blocks of the three-box framework. It often uses examples from various companies to prepare the reader for each section’s exercises.
Process: In this section, we describe each section’s relevant exercises and how they relate to the innovation process. We break them into sequential steps where applicable, and share practical tips based on our field experience. Please see The Three-Box Solution Playbook Toolkit for editable templates, exercises, and tools to support your three-box journey.
Ideas in Practice: Here we provide examples from companies that elucidate the process you’ll conduct within your own company.
As an in-depth case study, throughout the book we use the example of the New York Times Company, which started a Box 3 experiment called New York Times Digital (NYTD) in 1995 in response to the emergence of the internet. While there certainly may be examples of other companies that have strategically reinvented business models to future-proof their growth and leadership, we like NYTD for several reasons. First, it is an easy-to-follow story. Also, the evolution of NYTD during 1995–2019 provides several teachable moments for applying the three-box framework. Second, the newspaper industry has gone through turbulent times in the last two decades. Third, NYTD is a great example to drive home the central point of the three-box solution: the idea that the future is now. No doubt the world will change rapidly in the future. To ensure their ability to thrive in the future, companies need to prepare now. They must think “future-back” but move from “current-forward.”
In addition to the in-depth New York Times Company example, we provide breadth through other examples. Thus, we cover how the three-box framework tools apply in different industries, companies, and environments.
How This Playbook Complements The Three-Box Solution
The Three-Box Solution and this playbook are highly integrated. The Three-Box Solution introduces the framework as well as its significance and motivates organizations to balance all three boxes to lead innovation. The Three-Box Solution Playbook provides a practitioner’s perspective, along with field-tested tools and methodologies that organizations can systematically apply to drive Box 3 innovations.
Because Box 3 innovation is a matter of changing business processes, mind-sets, and culture, it is accomplished most efficiently when it doesn’t simply trickle down from the top. This playbook can serve as a force multiplier. The more managers in your organization who have learned to use the methodologies and tools in the playbook, the more likely change will happen faster and with less of the usual friction.