Create business opportunities across the organisation
There is tremendous untapped potential in organisations to develop their future business. What’s frequently missing is the ability to see what works elsewhere and combine expertise across organisational boundaries to crack the challenge of future business. Applying some basic principles – such as the ones mentioned here – will get most teams on the way to creating the new without massive commitment of resources.
Get inspired and explore alternatives outside your domain
The best opportunities for understanding and imagining opportunities come more readily when other markets and business are used for inspiration. Customers and businesses in other sectors often have solutions for challenges that aren’tcommonplace in your sector. Identify the thing customers truly care about to adapt and incorporate best practices in your product or service.
Make improvements where they matter to customers
When an organisation examines product or service roadmaps from their customers’ perspective, it often comes as a surprise that only a few initiatives deliver real value to them. A second surprise comes when organisations start to really listen to their customers and find many obvious ways to improve their products or eliminate service barriers. The third surprise is that changes can often be implemented as quick wins and/or at low cost.
Time to renew versus time to improve
Completely changing the positioning of products and introducing new services might feel like innovation within the business, but from the outside it can be perceived as a business playing catch up with their competitors. The digitisation of products and services doesn’t allow small-step improvements, but requires substantial commitment and drive to rethink and renew what businesses offer to whom and how.
Simplification is a key to developing better business
Customers in business and consumer markets crave simplicity in the products and services they buy, use and contract. While some companies improve their offerings by taking out unnecessary processes and complex features, very few organisations adopt a policy of continuous simplification. The business case for simplification can be tremendous – fewer failures and complaints and higher sales and satisfaction from customers and staff. Creating minimal viable offers also means faster time to market and ability to respond to changing demands.
Acceleration without losing essential quality
Taking an internal process from months to seconds might sound impossible but in a real-time digital world such redesigns are essential to staying relevant. Technologies like 3d printing, big data and continuous connectivity enable the creation of faster services. The eradication of wait-time and late-time can only be achieved by rethinking what customers experience. The key is to focus on what customers actually use and when, not on what internal processes or systems dictate.
Work towards desired outcomes to help realise the new business
Knowing upfront what is most desired: speed, simplicity, renewal, adoption – helps to focus on the right things to get a department or entire business to deliver value. The inspiration for achieving such outcomes within your organisation can often be found in other sectors and by gaining insights into what truly matters to customers. Clear business drivers in combination with an outside-in perspective and internal expertise can create high impact capability to any business – today.