ACCELERATING IDEA TO MARKET
• Coloplast, a Danish company
• Wide range of medical products
• Its stage-gate process is called AIM.
• A ‘gate’ is a decision point at which the project is reviewed by the ‘gate-keepers’, senior managers with authority to keep worthy projects moving ahead quickly. The gates serve as the critical quality control checkpoints between the stages.
BUILDING THE BUSINESS CASE
• Tools include
• Simulation and prototyping
• The simulation technology has helped facilitate the kind of early discussion and refinement of the concept.
TESCO
• The major challenge in 2006 was the decision to enter the highly competitive US market which it has done with its ‘Fresh and Easy’ chain of stores.
• Made extensive use of ethnographic tools to try and understand how their target group of shoppers lived.
• Their corporate affairs director put it, ‘spending time with people in their houses, looking in their cupboards and fridges and actually shopping with them is a great way to understand the market’
BUILDING A PORTFOLIO
• A portfolio involves balancing the results of assessing the individual projects which comprise it.
• Techniques used
• 2D and 3D matrices
• Mathematical Programming
DECISION MAKING AT THE EDGE
• Heuristics and internal rules for resource allocation are unhelpful and may actively militate against placing bets on the new options because they are far outside the firm’s normal framework.
• Reframing is unavoidable and it is often too late.
• Core competencies become core rigidity
EXAMPLES OF JUSTIFICATIONS FORNON-ADOPTION OF RADICAL IDEAS
• It’s not our business
• Recognition of an interesting new business idea but rejection because it lies far from the core competence of the firm
• It’s not a business
• Evaluation suggests the business plan is flawed along some key dimension
• It’s not big enough for us
• Emergent market size is too small
• Not invented here
• Recognition of interesting idea with potential but reject it - often by finding flaws or mismatch to current internal trajectories
• Invented here
• Recognition of interesting idea but rejection because internally generated version is perceived to be superior
• We’re not cannibals
• Recognition of potential for impact on current markets and reluctance to adopt potential competing idea
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
•Wait and see
• Allow the market to deal with early-stage uncertainty.
• Taking fast-second
• Microsoft
• was not an early mover in fields like the Internet or GUI, but which used its considerable resource base to play a successful ‘fast-second’ game.