Accelerating growth is a key theme that's often on a company's agenda. The paths to accelerated growth can differ significantly from company to company, even within the same industry. However, focusing on high value ideas, proving their value through relentless validation of concepts, and aiming for a fast go-to-market form the basis for strategic design, which based on our experience can enable accelerated growth regardless of operating environment.

The current pace of change can seem overwhelming as new business models emerge and competition is growing more fierce. To stay in the game, companies need to continuously renew themselves and find new avenues of growth. One way to achieve this is through developing meaningful services and experiences. And by accelerating their development through strategic design, the much needed growth can be attained faster than otherwise possible.

Companies are increasingly looking inward to propel growth. A majority (62%) of CEOs are looking to drive revenue growth through new product and service launches.

Gartner, 2020

https://www.gartner.com/en/innovation-strategy/trends/new-product-development-teams

Developing meaningful services and experiences can be described as a carefully managed interplay of three equally important elements: business focus, understanding your customer, and recognizing capabilities. Focusing on only one or two of these often leads to a situation where either the service doesn't make commercial sense, the customer's don't enjoy it or there simply aren't the right capabilities required to achieve success.​

Companies should aim to focus their limited resources to actions that really count. Constantly maintaining business focus ensures that resources are placed on initiatives that are commercially viable through practices of business design. While it may take some time to reach first commercial results, it's crucial to early on consider whether something would make commercial sense. However, focusing too much on this aspect, especially early on, often leads to incremental development that only marginally improves the service.

At the core of each product and service are the customers. Without the customers there wouldn't be a viable business, which highlights the importance of understanding your customers. Design thinking enables a full understanding of customers, who they are, what their main challenges and pain points are. These insights can then be turned to meaningful services that provide solutions to identified challenges. But focusing solely on customer needs and wants can have an adverse effect as the service either can't become profitable or be built using current capabilities.

Regardless of how much a product makes commercially sense or how much your customers love it, without being able to deliver the service and experience it won't make an impact. Through recognizing capabilities that are required to deliver a service, concepts can be prioritized based on their feasibility, which in turn ensures that resources are placed where they matter the most. However, only working on areas within existing capabilities without developing new ones can potentially inhibit renewal and development of new crucial capabilities.

Enabling an impactful future

Strategic design entails finding the right balance between these three elements, which by no means is an easy task. The optimal balance shifts with time, meaning that constant alignment is needed. Managing to find, and stay on, the golden path can enable you to reap the full benefits of acceleration efforts. The nuances of each element are diverse and not always easy to define to start with, which can make the beginning of the journey seem daunting. However, experience is a very powerful teacher and the benefits of learning the ins and outs of this balancing act can be significant.

At BearingPoint we have built a vast experience in strategic design through working together with numerous clients in diverse industries to successfully manage this interplay to propel our client's business towards accelerated growth. We support our clients all the way from enabling them to make informed decisions about acceleration efforts to quickly develop and test new experiences all the way to building the foundations for success. In all cases we leverage the latest industry specific insights and cross-industry best practices and methodologies combined with our own experiences.

How we support our clients to accelerate growth through meaningful services

Drop us a line to hear more about how we could support your journey towards accelerated growth. We're looking forward to hearing about your challenges and discussing how we could build together a brighter future for your business.

Authors

Sami Loikala
Head of Customer Experience and Design

Max Knuts
Senior Business Consultant