The Prime Mover Matrix: A Conversation Piece for Building Strategic Innovative Capacity

The article introduces the Prime Mover Matrix as a conversation piece that will help management build strategic innovation capacity and gain desired influence on industrial standards and thus power. After all, just because a company calls itself innovative and invests in R&D does not mean it is actually innovative. To be strategically innovative means that a company deliberately builds its technical innovative capacity and business innovative capacity in relation to the influence of other actors' actions and innovations. By doing this, a company will be able to increase its influence on industrial standards and gain the necessary power to reach its objectives. It is a relative position towards a moving target, which is why companies must continuously change through learning. This means that management needs help to reflect on how their own company's innovative capacity compares to their competitors, and they must unceasingly steer their capacity towards the desired innovation position. Today, we lack intuitive and usable tools that will facilitate strategic conversations on how to best invest for desired innovation capacity. In order to fill this void, this article proposes the Prime Mover Matrix: a model that functions as a conversation piece for triggering an assessment of an industry's technical, business, and prime movers.