Building A Collaboration - Driven Business Strategy

By M. Isi Eromosele

As global companies strive to enhance their value networks and relationships, they need to particularly consider two vital tenets of business. These are (1) a focus on core competencies and strategic assets and (2) promote collaboration partnerships.

With the increased speed and value demanded by today’s markets, few companies can provide both core offerings and take advantage of new markets trends on their own.

As global companies aim to make their value networks sources of greater shareholder value, they must define their core and non-core activities as well as the strategic assets they possess.

Subsequently, it is highly useful for these companies to either independently develop competitive advantage and marketplace differentiation or collaborate with partners to do so. This approach sharpens focus within the company and increases its agility to respond to changes in its business and marketplace environments.

In forming partnerships, companies should be very careful not to outsource their strategic options as the cost of doing so can be prohibitively expensive.

Many global companies are building collaboration through partnerships. These partnering arrangements work best when a company is at subcritical mass in a particular area. This can be facilitated through Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

Business Process Outsourcing provides companies with the ability to focus while providing new options for building new capabilities, achieving faster speed to market and gaining new levels of efficiency.

BPO moves entire functions and processes outside the organization, creating new hybrid extended enterprises. BPO allows an organization to assemble core capabilities through the extension of its value network, a further indication that companies are increasingly viewing competition as occurring between value networks rather than individual firms.

Global companies of all shapes and sizes are implementing collaborative partnerships by providing customers, suppliers and design teams with real-time access to critical common data. They share assets that sustain and are sustained by an Eco-driven mindset.

These companies collaborate on product innovation, share information and pool intellectual capital on a global basis, which helps them identify conflicts early in the product design process, thereby reducing work, cycle time, required resources and costs.

As a result of the above, collaboration is not merely a convenient trend, but a growing competitive necessity. Collaboration helps companies change the pattern and quality of the business and creative connections they have with each other to their mutual benefit.

As the technological component of innovation accelerates, collaboration takes on a new and multi-directional meaning. Even with only modest investments, collaboration now works for a wide range of companies.

To be successful in building partnerships that foster business collaboration, your company needs to adhere to the following principles:

• Understand your network of relationships as a key asset. The rapid velocity, transparency and role blurring of today’s changing global business environment is moving the basis of competition from the individual company to the value network. Companies must proactively embrace this structural shift.
• Identify and focus on your strategic assets and core competencies. As companies look at their value networks, they need to understand the role they play in those networks and how they contribute to creating value. Simultaneously, they must strive to retain and enhance the qualities and attributes that differentiate them from others in their networks.
• Foster collaboration within your value network. The reduction of transaction friction and availability of information are creating new opportunities for collaboration and create value. Both values are essential to success.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2011 Oseme Group

Business Change = Strengthened Internal Capabilities

By M. Isi Eromosele

Business change comes in many guises, including discovery of new market opportunities, revealing of new business threats within a market segment, finding new applications for existing products and formulation of enhanced marketing processes.

Implementing responses to the issues indicated above require recurring adjustments in internal business processes and corporate policies to align resources in dealing with them.

Organizations that have fostered and established a flexible and innovative corporate culture will have a much easier time scaling up or adjusting their internal corporate environment as required in order to respond efficiently to take advantage of opportunities or firmly respond to market threats.

Continued refinement of business practices provides the discipline that businesses need to objectively review and realign the resources they need to achieve sustained growth. This assures that the most excellent capabilities are retained, even while changing current corporate approaches.

An internal change, such as creating a new product line can be disruptive for an unprepared company. If a company is not prepared for it, even a basic change event can be very demanding on internal operations. A company’s internal systems should be able to deal with incremental change in a smooth and seamless way.

The company management and staff should be able to support and evolve with the changes necessary for the firm’s success in a continuously developing business environment. Technology should be implemented as a strong underpinning enabler for the business changes that occur within any business to succeed.

In affecting changes, whether they are internal adjustments such as product development, or external ones such as complying with new government regulations, it is imperative that a company retain its basic values and goals, even as its techniques of operations evolve. The need to structure for corporate stability as well as instability must be fully disseminated, despite the apparent contradiction.

Specific principal business elements will have to remain constant even as other core components are modified. It is very important that an atmosphere of shared vision and clarity of mission be encouraged to provide a common supporting foundation for management and staff, even as operational changes are occurring.

Internal business changes will affect company staff in different ways respectively. Core employees, who would normally interact only with internal peers will benefit from clarity of company mission and business objectives, even as they adjust to new business practices. These employees, considered central resources, range from human resources to middle level and line operating staff at company headquarters.

They would tend to have fixed daily routines and may not always be proactive in pointing out ways that could result in their jobs being streamlined through the implementation of new procedures.

Another group of employees that play a critical role in business change are the “edge” workers. These employees interact with customers and suppliers, representing key touch points for change implementations and intelligence gathering.

They are the first line of intelligence, providing key information about changing customer needs. Formal regular access to the information they gather should be an integral part of your business change efforts.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2011 Oseme Group

Innovation - Critical Success Factor For Business Growth Part I

By M. Isi Eromosele

Innovation is a critical driver for business growth. An organization’s ability to innovate has become an increasingly vital competitive differentiator in today’s fast moving global business environment.

Rapid innovation and increased success in the marketplace depend on having a clear picture of a new product or service’s influence on a company’s profitability, even before resources and funds are invested in its development. This requires the implementation of value driver analysis, which would give you a strong quantitative sign of the likelihood of success for your product or service in your target market.

A culture of innovation promotes enterprise growth. A company that can innovate within its marketplace will gain a sustained competitive advantage over its competitors. In order for innovation to be a truly successful growth strategy, it must be implemented deliberately, with a focus on success.

A company’s top management must define innovation within the context of its business goals. Questions that need to be answered may include:

• Is the primary purpose the company’s innovation implementation to create new products, new markets or the improvement of their current operations?
• What are the economic gains that would result from such innovations?
• Which employee groups are most crucial to the proposed innovation-based strategy?
• Is the innovation implementation going to be incremental or revolutionary?

Another important aspect in implementing innovation is corporate culture. A corporate culture that does not encourage flexible business processes and fluid procedures will ensure that an innovative strategy will fail within the company.

The returns on implementing innovation in any company are not a function of financial investment but depend on the quality of that organization’s innovation process. For it to succeed, innovation efforts must be aligned with a company’s business strategy and its organizational design, systems and structure. Innovation will not succeed in a vacuum. It needs to become an integral part of how the company operates.

One available tool critical to the success of innovation implementation is value driver analysis, which enables a company to quantify the benefits of innovation and assess and compare innovation based activities against those of competing priorities. Additionally, this instrument enables a company to establish a policy for aligning decision making and employee behavior on a sustained basis, helping employees see the distinction between day-to-day activities and innovative ones.

Value driver analysis can also educate top management to see how innovation can support the building of an innovative culture within the company.

The value driver analysis results should be grouped into four organizational areas:

• Technology - Which enabling advanced technologies should be utilized in addressing unmet customer needs?
• Process - Which process activities should be changed to increase efficiency of product development?
• Structure - What structural realignments need to be developed organizationally to increase innovation in how products are delivered?
• People - How would the staff be realigned with an "innovation critical talent" as a core to draw other employees toward creating a culture of innovation?

Multiple people programs may be used to drive innovation-focused decision making and behavior. These include performance management, incentives, career progression, business literacy and leadership actions.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2011 Oseme Group

Innovation - Critical Success Factor For Business Growth Part II

By M. Isi Eromosele

In the implementation of innovation within a company, the achievement of growth targets by specific business units should be made a priority, while secondary consideration would be given to profit.

The result is that business unit managers will aggressively pursue innovation in order to attain these growth targets. Business unit managers may also be challenged to identify additional areas for growth within their business areas of responsibility.

Innovative multipliers can be built into incentive programs to reward results attained through innovation as opposed to the ones achieved through sales efficiency and improved marketing.

Roles that can have significant impact on the achievement of high business results should be identified and customized incentives built around them. By identifying roles that can serve as innovation advocates, a company can capitalize on the required sharing of best practices, thereby avoiding effort duplication.

Employees in a particular department may be designated as innovation advocates and given the responsibility of leveraging best practices from other parts of the organization to improve performance of the department, while ensuring that best practices from within their department are disseminated to other parts of the company.

It is imperative that employees and managers be educated on how innovation drives business performance and company growth. This would enable them to better appreciate the economic impact of such innovation, understand how their respective roles in the company can drive innovation and learn how they can contribute individually and as part of a group.

Innovation is the ideal antidote for companies striving for growth. Companies that place innovation on the same economic level as their other strategies through a value driver framework will attain greater success establishing the concept within their companies as well as realizing its full benefits.

Value driver analysis offer a concrete way for companies to analyze how alternative decisions, including the development of new products can affect profitability. Value driver analysis does not get rid of the risks associated with the implementation of innovation.

However, by analyzing and quantifying factors that will have the greatest effects on innovation, it gives companies a greater measure of control over these risks and puts innovation on the same level as other business strategies.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

Copyright Control © 2011 Oseme Group