By Jonathan Gordon, Nils Liedtke and Bjorn Timelin | McKinsey | September 2016

Three types of growth:

1. The Investor has a clear understanding of where growth is with existing products and services and doubles down on the winners.
2. The Creator builds value through new products or services. Creators work at the frontiers of change to identify the white spaces—in emerging customer needs, unserved segments, or adjacent markets. They harness advanced analytics and digital to disrupt markets, not just improve existing models.
3. The Performer constantly optimises core commercial capabilities in sales, marketing, pricing, and customer experience.

There are three horizons of action – NOW, NEW and NEXT! Consider these questions:

1. How balanced is our portfolio? If we take our portfolio of growth and innovation initiatives and plot them against NOW NEW NEXT, how balanced does the distribution look? Do we have a perspective on which of the six “growth plays” would be successful in our business?
2. Who is thinking about disruption? Are we as systematic in NEXT as we are in NOW? Is anyone tasked with disrupting our core business—or are we leaving it up to competitors? What are we doing to explore additive business models?
3. Are we limiting our horizons? In exploring NEW opportunities, do we impose limiting mind-sets on how we define consumers, our category, or the addressable channels?
4. Do we use advantaged insights? Do we rely on the same data and insights as our competitors—or do we have a source of distinctiveness?
5. Are we agile enough? Have we been able to accelerate our time-to-consumer and time-to-market? Or are we still stuck with cumbersome and slow innovation processes?

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