Dipl.-Ing. Lars Behrendt

//CEO@GRANNY&SMITH, DE-RISKING INNOLAB FOR THE MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES

I’m an inventor, innovator and investor. I turn real problems into real companies.My career changed the moment I realized most innovations fail for the same reason: everyone talks about ideas - almost no one builds them.In boardrooms and workshops, I watched brilliant concepts suffocate under politics, process and PowerPoints. The spark in people’s eyes faded the moment reality entered the room. I couldn’t unsee it.So I stopped helping people discuss the future and started building it.Over the past 15 years, I’ve created products, ventures and business models that didn’t exist before. What began as engineering evolved into a practice: recognizing real unmet needs, inventing the solution and forming a company around it.Today, I operate where invention, innovation and investment meet. I don’t manage portfolios — I create the companies they’re built from.How I work: • real-world problems • physical + digital products • validated demand • scalable models • long-term ownershipWhat drives me: If you can see a better future, you’re responsible for building it. I work with people who believe progress comes from creating, not talking — and who want to bring things into the world that should already exist.That’s why I build.More: grannyandsmith.com

We are here to help you develop, test, and grow new business ideas in a few weeks instead of months. We specialize in innovation development, constantly keeping up with the latest trends, methods, and ways of working.

We have been developing innovation for our customers for more than 15 years now. Our teams, consisting of designers, engineers, software developers, and business model experts, have tried a lot and gained much experience. Today we know what works and what does not - so you don't have to make all those experiences again.

Our INNOWEEK® method is the result of more than 15 years of continuous development and project experience with well-known DAX groups and Fortune 500 companies and helps you to develop, test, and grow new business ideas in a few weeks instead of months.

STEVE JOBS: HOW MANY OF YOU ARE CONSULTANTS? OH... THAT'S BAD!

Consulting is broken.

A lot of smart people…
 _Sell you a PowerPoint.
 _Disappear when it’s time to execute.

_No skin in the game.
_No responsibility.
_No results.

Consulting can feel like hiring someone to build you a sandcastle…
 …and finding out they only brought a whiteboard.

Big ideas. Fancy slides.

And when it’s time to actually do the thing — poof — they’re gone.

We prefer a different game: roll up sleeves, build stuff that works, and maybe get some sand in our shoes.

Because in innovation, the fun part is not talking about the castle.
 
It’s standing in front of it saying: 

“Yep. We made that.”

———

The strategy 7 of Germany's most innovative companies already follow
https://lnkd.in/dexsVrw8

#innovation #innoweek #venturestudio #companybuilder #startupstudio #vc 

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Dipl Ing Lars Behrendt 

INVENTOR · INNOVATOR · INVESTOR - Building Companies. Not Slide Decks. We build and scale industrial ventures. At own risk.

STEVE JOBS SAID ONE DECISION IN LIFE SEPARATES SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE FROM THOSE WHO ONLY DREAM

That decision? 

PERSEVERANCE.

Steve Jobs put it perfectly:

"I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.... Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up."

Jobs knew this from experience. He was fired from Apple, started over with NeXT, then came back to build one of the world's most valuable companies.
Here's what separates dreamers from achievers:

_Passion fuels persistence - Without deep passion for your mission, you'll quit when things get tough

_Setbacks become feedback - Every failure reveals what customers really want and where you need to improve

_Long-term vision beats short-term pain - When you're anchored in your "why," you can weather any storm

_Persist, but pivot - Stay committed to the goal while being flexible in your approach

Research backs this up: Angela Duckworth's studies show that grit and sustained perseverance predict success better than IQ or talent alone.

The next time you want to quit, ask yourself: Am I facing a dead end—or just the natural friction of progress?

The leaders who refuse to quit, who show up one more time after setbacks, are the ones who ultimately cross the finish line.

What's one time perseverance made all the difference in your journey? 

———

The strategy 7 of Germany's most innovative companies already follow
https://lnkd.in/dexsVrw8

#innovation #innoweek #venturestudio #companybuilder #startupstudio #vc 

All rights and credits are reserved for the respective owner(s). 
Contact me to be added as a reference or to request content removal.

♻️ Share this with someone building the next big thing. 
Follow Dipl.-Ing. Lars Behrendt for innovation strategies that actually work.

➕LEVEL UP YOUR STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP ➟ I share proven systems, actionable tips, and lessons from 20+ years of helping CEOs make better strategy ➕STRATEGY ADVISOR TO CEOs + THEIR TEAMS ➟ Learn more in my ABOUT section👇

Most professionals reach a point in their career where the rules change — quietly.

What used to matter most — execution, reliability, getting things done — stops being what earns trust.

The conversations shift. The decisions get murkier. And you're no longer being asked for your performance only, but for your judgment.

That moment is rarely named. But every senior professional eventually feels it.

It's the moment when strategic responsibility expands faster than your preparation for it.

And that's exactly where most leadership development stops helping.

I built The Better Strategy School to close that gap.

Not by offering more frameworks or theories — but by creating an environment where serious professionals can develop strategic leadership deliberately, while their work is live.

The School is a professional formation environment. Participants work on real strategic challenges, reason through them with peers, and receive direct feedback from faculty who have spent decades at the intersection of strategy practice and strategic leadership research.

It is not a course. It is not a seminar. It is a place to develop the capability to lead strategy — repeatedly, under pressure, with genuine consequence.

Strategy becomes your responsibility long before it becomes your title.

That's the moment this work exists for.

If you're ready to develop strategic leadership deliberately:

📍 www.makebetterstrategy.com 📩 team@makebetterstrategy.com

Marc Sniukas

The customer is not the center of strategy.

Most leaders I meet believe this is heresy.

But the observation keeps recurring in practice.

When strategy is reduced to customer value alone, the firm slowly erodes its own capacity to compete.

What often goes unnoticed is that sustainable strategy requires coherence across three value domains simultaneously.

The customer must benefit.

The firm must benefit.

And the ecosystem — partners, suppliers, adjacent players — must also see advantage in participating.

Collapse this to one dimension, and the system becomes unstable.

In practice, this shows up when a brilliant customer innovation drains resources the firm cannot replenish.

Or when ecosystem partners quietly disengage because the value exchange became asymmetrical.

The most durable strategies I've observed operate at the intersection.

They make deliberate trade-offs between these constituencies rather than optimizing for any single one.

This is not stakeholder theory reheated.

It is a structural feature of how value creation systems actually function.

The uncomfortable truth: many strategy failures look like customer problems on the surface.

They are actually coherence problems underneath.

The firm created value for buyers it could not afford to sustain.

Or prioritized returns that hollowed out the partnerships it later needed.

This tension doesn't resolve with better customer research.

It requires holding multiple value logics in mind at once.

And making choices that feel suboptimal from any single perspective.

Most strategic planning processes are not designed for this.

They optimize one horizon and delegate the others to "execution."

This is where competitive advantage quietly breaks down.

Strategy, strategic thinking, and
strategic leadership are not the same thing.

Most people use them interchangeably.

That conflation is where a lot of organizational confusion quietly begins.

1️⃣ Strategy is the coherent approach an organization uses to overcome its key challenges and make its ambitions achievable.

It is not a document. Not a plan. Not a list of initiatives produced once a year and reviewed quarterly.

It is an ongoing practice of diagnosing situations, making consequential choices, and aligning action — so the organization can move forward despite uncertainty and constraint.

2️⃣ Strategic thinking is something different.

It is an individual capability. The ability to decide what truly matters, when many things seem important.

More precisely: the capacity to diagnose complex situations, make consequential choices under uncertainty, and align action — not as a cognitive style, not as a personality trait, but as applied judgment in a social system.

3️⃣ Strategic leadership is different again.

It is not primarily about deciding the strategy.

It is about making the organization capable of acting strategically.

That requires three things: direction — clarifying what matters most and what trade-offs are accepted; environment — designing the conditions that make the right behavior easier; and mobilization — converting intent into coordinated action.

In practice, most strategies fail not because they were poorly written.

They fail because nobody orchestrated coordinated action around difficult choices.

The strategy existed. The strategic thinking may have been sound.

But the leadership practice — the direction, the environment, the mobilization — was absent.

What often goes unnoticed is that these three things operate at different levels.

Strategic thinking is a capability. Strategy is an approach. Strategic leadership is a practice.

Developing one does not automatically develop the others.

A leader can think strategically and still produce an incoherent strategy.

An organization can have a coherent strategy and still fail to make it show up in daily decisions.

👉 This is where the distinction stops being academic.

– You can have strategic thinkers without a strategy → intelligent discussions, no alignment.

– You can have a strategy without strategic leadership → a document, not behavior.

– You can have leadership activity without strategy → activity without direction.

Make Better Strategy: Which of the three is the weakest link in your organization?

📌 Download the hi-res pdf of this document: https://lnkd.in/dUJwCwUR

👉 Share to help someone in your network make better strategy.

‼️ Follow Dr. Marc Sniukas for more insights on real strategy.

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