Overly simplified models of the world lead inevitably to inadequate conclusions and unprofitable pursuits. That’s why so many businesses recently have succumbed to disruptive outsiders. They weren’t building enough interdependencies and complexities into their market projections. Cisco’s former CEO is widely quoted as forecasting that around 40 percent of the companies operating today will no longer exist within 10 years.
Due to factors such as increasing connectivity, a population explosion, and the exponential rate of technology development, market dynamics are changing more rapidly than ever before. A more stable place for business to operate and create value would be within a framework of values, capabilities, and the aspirations defined independently by each organization. On the global scale, political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental and demographical drivers all must be taken into consideration in creating that framework. These are dynamics that business leaders can’t afford to ignore or simplify.
We’ve come up with 8 questions to help you analyze and outline strategies for market development now and in the near future:
- What is the competitive economic environment in which we must operate?
- How is it changing?
- What are our assets (tangible and intangible) and how do we use them to give us an advantage relative to competitors? How is our competitiveness changing?
- Who are our customers/clients/members today? Who will they be tomorrow? What do they/will they “need”?
- What is our unique value (“sweet spot”)?
- How do we align our assets, our people, and values systems to deliver on our unique sweet spot?
- How do we handle shrinking sweet spots and the disruptive sweet spots of competitors, both new and potential?
- How do we organize for interacting with other organizations to identify new sweet spots and prolong, extend, and preserve existing sweet spots, whether they are our own or a part of a cluster/echo system?
Dive deeper into all of these issues in the latest edition of Innovation360’s Complete Guide to Business Innovation. The final volume, Sustainable Growth and Profits, just became available in print and electronic versions through Amazon. It is designed to help you discover the most prudent path through uncertainty and build your own innovation portfolio inside a learning organization.
