Learning Launch – Business Model Augmentation

Challenge

As the Head of a division in what has quickly become a highly competitive marketplace, my team was  faced with a unique set of challenges.  We had to quickly pivot off of our traditional business model and  determine what new areas of opportunities to develop beyond the continued focus of our product  pipeline.  Our goal was to identify additional spaces within our business segment and quickly start  augmenting our business model by taking key strategic bets and validate our assumptions

Selection

We were a team of individuals that had already participated in various Design Thinking activities with  the organization.  For this particular approach, I determined that Learning Launch would be the most  effective mechanism to quickly begin to navigate the various areas we wanted to explore and enter.

Application

We conducted a handful of brainstorming sessions and quickly identified 4 focus areas to test which we  felt were the pathways to not only augment the future trajectory of our division, but also lead the way  in the industry in a couple of the areas.  The intent was to place various bets in multiple areas and to  learn fast and build or kill.  We introduce projects in the following areas: new product category  development, online channel creation, and innovative and creative product design efforts.

All 3 were approached slightly differently.  For category development, we did desk research to  determine categories which could warrant high value and subsequently discussed with key customers.   For online channel creation, we evaluated our pipeline and in parallel identified partners that had  already started work in this space and began partnership discussions.  Finally, with product design  efforts, we brainstormed ideas on what our end customers my need and subsequently presented  concepts to the buying teams at our customers.

Insight

The Learning Launch approach was the most effective means for my team to define, evaluate and  implement our ideas.  But more importantly, we were able to quickly pivot and make adjustments to the  approach with the focus on modifying strategy to achieve the desired outcome.  The key realization is  that we did not clearly define the parameters of what our end goal could be and when and how to  kill/drop a project.  As a result, a few efforts likely progressed to long.

Approach

This is a very effective approach, however as the team continues to navigate and look to build upon our  existing business model, the future efforts will benefit greatly from the learnings to date.  With the  lessons learned, we will be sure to clearly define what success looks like, but continue to revisit and  allow for the strategic drop decision to be taken in a timely manner.

