The Art of Opportunity

How to Build Growth and Ventures Through Strategic Innovation and Visual Thinking

Marc Sniukas, Parker Lee, Matt Morasky

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781119151586
• eBook ISBN: 9781119151593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Innovate your way toward growth using practical, research-backed frameworks

The Art of Opportunity offers a path toward new growth, providing the perspective and methods you need to make innovation happen. Written by a team of experts with both academic and industry experience—and a client roster composed of some of the world's leading companies—this book provides you with the necessary tools to help you capture growth instead of chasing it.

The visual frameworks and research-based methodology presented in The Art of Opportunity merge business design thinking and strategic innovation to help you change your growth paradigm. You'll learn creative and practical methods for exploring growth opportunities and employ a new approach for identifying what "opportunity" looks like in the first place. Put aside the old school way of focusing on new products and new markets, to instead applying value creation to find your new opportunity, craft your offering, design your strategy and build new growth ventures.

The changing business ecosystem is increasingly pushing traditional thinking out to pasture. New consumers and the new marketplace are demanding a profound adjustment to the way companies plan and execute growth strategies. This book gives you the tools to create your roadmap toward the new state of growth, and gain invaluable insight into a new way of thinking.

The Art of Opportunity will help you to:

• Start looking at business growth from a new perspective
• Create value for the customers, company and ecosystem
• Innovate strategically and design new business models

• Develop a new active business design thinking approach to innovation

Your company's goal is to grow, and to turn non-customers into customers. The old ways are becoming less tenable and less cost-effective. The Art of Opportunity outlines the new growth paradigm and gives you a solid framework for putting new ideas into practice.

Part 1
Artful Innovation

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we seize growth opportunities in a targeted way and benefit from the dynamic development of new business areas in the long term.

— PROSIEBENSAT.1 MEDIA Annual Report 2014¹

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Chapter 1

When Thomas Ebeling became the new CEO of ProSiebenSat.¹ Media AG (Pro7) in 2009, he faced a familiar problem: how to grow the business. Pro7 was the leading media company in the German TV advertising market with their core business of free TV—financed by advertising. Mr. Ebeling's challenge was how to grow the business and achieve over €1 billion in incremental revenues by 2018. Resorting to traditional strategic moves, expanding existing businesses and offerings, would certainly not do the trick.

Pro7 crafted a unique strategy for a new business area making TV advertising available to start-ups, and small and medium-sized companies, two customer segments that traditionally couldn't afford TV advertising and were seen as unprofitable by the industry. One year after the new business had been launched, it had already generated €20 million in profit. Five years later, Pro7 had achieved tremendous success with its new strategy. In fact, the strategy worked so well that in 2015, the €1 billion plus target was increased to €1.85 billion.

Business professionals and scholars admire achievements like these and wonder how Pro7 tapped into new markets and developed new business areas. Finding and seizing opportunities for new growth is, after all, the Holy Grail of business. And if Pro7 didn't use traditional growth methods, exactly how did they arrive at new offerings, complete with innovative business models and revenue models, to reach entirely new customer segments?

What Is Strategic Innovation?

The Art of Opportunity is about how strategic innovation and business design thinking can grow existing businesses and create completely new ones by discovering opportunities for new growth and crafting strategies to seize these opportunities.

Strategy is essentially about making choices about where to play and how to win. Strategic management theories offer frameworks to guide our thinking, help develop answers to these questions, and make such choices. The approach and concepts of The Art of Opportunity provide fresh and modern ways to look at these questions, enabling you to come up with more innovative answers than yesterday's traditional strategic management approaches might offer.

Traditional Strategic Management

On a Business Level, traditional strategic management ² is primarily concerned with where to play and how to win. Where to play is framed as a choice of industry and product/market combination. Simply speaking, you pick an industry, say air transportation, and a market, for example continental flights in the United States, and you define your offering within this market, for example low-cost direct city-to-city flights.

How to win is mostly defined as achieving competitive advantage. Michael Porter's classic generic choices ³ about how to achieve competitive advantage are to either (1) be a cost leader, (2) differentiate your offering, or (3) focus on a niche. Treacy and Wiersema⁴ offer three choices to win: (1) product leadership (offer the best product by focusing on product innovation); (2) operational excellence (be a price and convenience leader by focusing on low cost, lean and fast production, and speedy delivery); or (3) customer intimacy (win by creating loyal customers through tailored offerings and focusing on customer relationships).

Strategy development and execution thereby follow a linear process of analyzing the situation and environment, followed by developing a strategy, and finally executing it. The underlying principle is that the development of the strategy has to be completed before the strategy can be executed.

To be clear: we don't suggest that these traditional strategic management approaches do not work. For some organizations and in certain industries, they work extremely well, if applied in the right way. Yet a lot of companies also struggle when attempting to achieve their growth and innovation targets with these traditional frameworks.

Strategic Innovation

How Does our Take on strategic innovation differ from these more traditional approaches?

First of all, we shift the objective from focusing on achieving competitive advantage by simply being cheaper or different to finding and seizing opportunities by creating value. Traditional strategy is focused on the company, trying to position the company as being a cost leader, being different, focusing on a niche, or something similar, as we have seen. But being cheaper or different alone is simply no longer enough to be successful (if it ever was). The Art of Opportunity takes an entrepreneurial stance, looking beyond positioning your company to a larger holistic perspective that involves creating value for your customer, your firm, and your business ecosystem. Only by creating value for a multitude of stakeholders does your company have the potential to be successful. And creating value is achieved through more than simply offering a cheap or different product, to include products, services, the entire customer experience (CX), your business model, and your revenue model.

Having described the differences, let's examine The Art of Opportunity's approach to designing your strategy. The book offers a fresh perspective to look at three areas: (1) Where to play, (2) How to play, and (3) How to win.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Reader's Journey
• Part 1: Artful Innovation
• Part 2: Discover Your new Growth Opportunity
• Part 3: Craft Your Strategy
• Part 4: Launch Your New Growth Business
• Part 5: Mastering the Art: Business Design Thinking
• About the Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement