Facing a slowdown in its core business of selling ads tied to search terms, Google has recently been scouring the landscape for acquisitions. It bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 (and soon found itself facing a $1 billion copyright infringement suit from Viacom). Now it is said to be bidding more than $2 billion for the online advertising company DoubleClick. With outlays—and risks—of this magnitude, Google may find profitable growth in its acquisitions harder than it imagined.

Rapid shifts in markets and technologies are forcing companies of all sorts to change direction faster than ever. As a result, many management teams are tempted by "big bang" solutions: dramatic, transformative mergers or aggressive leaps into sexy new markets. But bold moves rarely pay off. The success rate for major, life-changing mergers is only about one in ten. It is less than one in seven for moves into a hot new market far from a company's core.

For most companies, reinvention of a core business doesn't have to involve such high levels of risk. Bain's research shows that nine out of every 10 companies that successfully renewed themselves in the past decade found the solution in mining their hidden assets—assets they already possessed but had failed to tap for maximum growth potential.

The classic example is Apple. The iPod drew on the company's well-known skills in software, user-friendly product design, and imaginative marketing—all underexploited capabilities. Samsung focused on a different set of hidden assets—underinvested business lines—to redefine its core. It shut down or sold 76 businesses, thereby freeing up resources to invest in its lagging but promising semiconductor and consumer-electronics businesses. Today, Samsung is a leader in memory chips and mobile phones as well as in high-end television sets and flat-screen monitors.

Shouldn't well-run companies already be using all of their valuable assets? In fact, large, complex organizations always acquire more capabilities and businesses than they can focus on at any one time. But when a company needs to redefine its core, it often discovers that secondary assets and capabilities of the past suddenly assume center stage, and are the key to new growth.

One way to open management's eyes to the hidden assets in its midst is to identify the richest hunting grounds. Bain's three-year study of transformation showed that assets yielding the best results are usually camouflaged as hidden business platforms, untapped customer insights, and underused capabilities. Turning an overlooked business platform into a new core is more common than you might imagine.

Think of how General Electric revitalized itself via GE Capital, a division that has now fueled its parent's growth and profitability for years. More recently, Nestle discovered it had a number of isolated food and drink products designed to be consumed outside the home. By assembling those products into a new unit, Nestle Food Services, it created the core of a new multibillion-dollar business.

Untapped customer insight is another hidden asset. Harman International, a maker of high-end audio equipment, faced stagnating growth in the consumer and professional audio markets. But Cofounder Sidney Harman had the insight that customers who bought expensive audio equipment at home were spending more time in their cars. Along the way, Harman also had purchased the German company Becker (which sold radios to Mercedes-Benz), allowing it to draw on Becker's digital audio capabilities, and to develop high-end automotive "infotainment" systems that fueled the company's renewal.  Based largely on its success in this new customer segment, Harman's market value increased 40-fold from 1993 to 2005.