How big, slow corporates can innovate

One of my most interesting consulting experiences was at an established UK smartboard company that wanted to play in a new market. Hired to advise them on  how to go about it, my team went on with more questions than answers. We first of all wanted to conduct a thorough ‘diagnosis’ in order to fully […]

One of my most interesting consulting experiences was at an established UK smartboard company that wanted to play in a new market. Hired to advise them on  how to go about it, my team went on with more questions than answers. We first of all wanted to conduct a thorough ‘diagnosis’ in order to fully understand their core business as well as answer a few questions ranging from why they want to play in a new market to their capacity to do so. Being a corporation with an already established presence in the educational sector, it was easy to examine their current customers, products, revenue, established sales processes (including business models and channels), the organisation, processes and assets. Once I had a tangible understanding of the company, I opted to use the Iceberg model of systems thinking to understand their problems beyond the surface.

Events: we outlined every major and recent event in the company/industry. Ranging from new products from competitors, surprising acquisitions by competitors, high/low, net promoter scores, talent exodus, exciting R&D projects that never left labs, drastic revenue drop/ sharp rise, etc. This was even more telling to the in-house employees we worked with than we thought.

Patterns of behaviour: We then clustered all the identified   events into patterns or trends, answering questions like: Is the company slow to understand changes in consumer behaviour and trends, putting core business at risk? Is any competitor’s market reach significantly expanded because of new acquisitions? Are people who leave going out to start successful ventures elsewhere? Is there a lack of new product ideas? Are there adequate product ideas but too few product releases? How motivated is the workforce? (Depending on the events identified, this list of patterns or trends gave us clearer, more tangible areas of focus.) From these, we then prioritised the findings, in order to focus on one area or a combination of two very similar ones.

System Structures: Here we looked at what influences the patterns and the relationships between the parts. Ranging from tangible infrastructure like physical space (artifacts) to the intangible collective habit (mental model). This enabled us to model the precise thinking around the company’s lack of new products or any persisting lack of effective exploration of new markets 

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Equipped with these insights, we proceed to work together with the company in examining substitute industries, studying the strategic groups within an identified substitute industry, identifying new buyers and adding complementary product and service offerings. Following the same technique, we also worked out the functional-emotional appeal to buyers, and leveraged on current trends to create new market opportunities for the company to explore. This led us to well-defined market opportunities.

Once we identified market opportunities we continued working with the company on a few iterative activities to ensure that our findings were validated. These ranged from further segmenting each market based on a primary market research, selecting a very suitable beachhead for the company to target within a particular market, developing a full life cycle use case as well as a high-level product specification and at the same time quantifying the value proposition for the user or economic buyer of the new product/service offering.

We utilised existing models like Iceberg Model, Developed by Peter Senge in his book Fifth Discipline. I like the Iceberg Model because it enables you to understand a problem from a systemic perspective and therefore best equips you to solve it for good. Also, should there be any further engagement beyond the current specific problem solved, this prepares you with a deep understanding of the organisation beyond the current project and therefore makes the model ideal for a long-term relationship.

At the risk of almost sounding cliché, we also elected the Blue Ocean Strategy in order to explore new market opportunities because coming from a very saturated market/industry, the company is best suited to chart a new course and innovate beyond just upselling or a mere new smartboard product in the same educational sector.

Looking back at this work, I realised that some of the methods could serve as a framework not only for big corporates to venture into new markets, but also for organisations to examine themselves and identify problems and their causes.