Business Design
New technologies and the global economy have changed the competitive landscape for almost every organization. This goes for emerging tech start-ups, corn farmers, and nearly everything in between.
Well before the recent financial crisis, a new breed of distress had emerged in organizations. This distress was rooted in the failure of organizations to build internal cultures of innovation and transformation. Without an internal culture of entrepreneurship, and a keen sensitivity to customers' needs, companies are quickly outflanked in today's market by competitors that are faster-moving and more empathic.
In the past, businesses could focus narrowly on fixing operational and financial issues to get a leg up on their competition. Today, operational and financial revitalizations are often still necessary, but no longer sufficient. Companies competing against fast-moving innovative competitors need a more comprehensive approach to revitalization that includes innovation and brand building alongside business model restructuring.
While traditional business model revitalization addresses the short-term operational and financial issues, initiatives in innovation and brand-building create the longer-term leaps in product and marketing innovation that drive the sustainability and growth of an organization.
The comprehensive process that blends all three methodologies is Business Design, and includes:
1. Business Model Revitalization
Existing companies, whether new or old, often keep forging ahead long after the market has rendered their core business model obsolete. Why? Change is difficult and unnatural for an organization that has historically been successful. And by nature, even the most skilled CEO's and MBA's have spent entire careers without the need to restructure an organization. Business Model Revitalization is a specialty that rapidly shakes loose the business model of an entity and lays all the financial, operational and marketing pieces of the business out on the table for examination. The pieces that don't work are taken out, and the pieces that do work well are reassembled in a new structure that returns profitability to a revised core business. This process includes reshaping relationships with constituencies across the business, including: vendors, lenders and customers.
2. Design-Thinking Innovation
True transformation of an organization requires a process that causes leaps of innovation beyond the core business, with the introduction of new products, new revenue streams and new business models to meet customers' evolving needs. It is this type of work that re-establishes growth and longer-term sustainability of the company. But this type of work requires taking leaps of faith because nothing being proposed has even been done and fully tested before.
"The core skill of innovators is error-recovery, not failure-avoidance."
Randy Nelson, Dean of PIXAR University
The process that has proven effective for this kind of innovation is Design-Thinking. Design-Thinking is a human-centered design process that starts with deeply understanding the customers' needs first, and then works backwards to create new product experiences and new business models to profitably meet those customers' needs. When flanked on each side by traditional restructuring and brand building, Design-Thinking provides the centerpiece to a holistic revitalization of an organization. Click here to explore more about Design-Thinking.
3. Brand Building
As an organization restructures and innovates, the relationships it has with its customers will transform. By design, new products and business models will need appropriate identities and messaging to maximize customers' responses. Rebuilding the brand(s), in the eyes of the customers, is a culminating piece of Business Design.
Business Design projects address all three methods above simultaneously.
