Every company needs an innovation strategy

The future of large corporations will be written by how well they innovate.

In 1955, the Fortune 500 was first published, and since then, 89% of the companies on the list have completely changed.

New companies are growing at unprecedented speed. It used to take 20 years for a traditional Fortune 500 company to reach a billion-dollar valuation.

Yet, if you look over the past few years, the billion-dollar valuation mark is being reached faster than ever. It took Tesla eight years; Facebook six; Google four; and Stripe less than two years to reach that mark.

In fact, 119 companies have achieved a $1 billion valuation in under a year.

The massive blue-chip companies were not ready for digital and the start-ups that grew from it, they now need to adapt to the new rules.

In 1983, Lorne Whitehead, a physicist from the University of British Columbia, was looking for a 'simple and dramatic demonstration of exponential growth’.

He demonstrated that a domino can knock over another domino one-and-a-half times its size.

Through a chain reaction, it would take just 29 progressively larger dominoes to knock down the 1,250-foot-tall Empire State Building.

Let that sink in… just 29 dominoes to know over the Empire State Building.

Technology can be the first domino for a large company.

While the threat might appear small at first and the change far off, it is a danger that can take down even the largest of companies.

The changes happening across all industries are dominoes that are starting to fall.

Behind many of those dominos are startups and entrepreneurs, who truly believe they can take down Empire State sized companies and redefine entire industries.

Big companies self-admittedly move slowly, yet, change to their business is happening every single day.

The first changes that happen take place in small increments that are often hardly noticeable.

But slowly but surely, these changes will keep on happening until it’s too late.

Innovation must be at the core of any company's strategy for growth.

As former Proctor & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald once said, "We know from our history that while promotions may win quarters, innovation wins decades."