How Multinationals Can Build Local Innovation Capabilities

Fractal innovation enables large companies to be more responsive to customer needs, leverage their global scale, and set the pace for their competition. Multinationals often face strong competition in geographies where nimble, local companies are able to succeed by meeting the changing demands of local customers with speed, responsiveness, and innovation.

Large companies face two main innovation challenges: They have a limited understanding of the local market and customers, and the opportunity size does not warrant big investments.
Fractal innovation can help multinationals address these challenges by decentralizing R&D decision making, such as by setting up local innovation centers and deploying regional R&D teams.
The path to this approach occurs along a continuum, moving from a global monolith R&D model to regional hubs, cluster-level innovation, and fractal-advantaged R&D.
While an “all-fractal” strategy won’t be right for all companies, many organizations can benefit by selectively deploying elements of the models to determine what fits best before diving deeper.