To build a sustainable, diversified business requires continuous search for ways to parlay available scarce resources into new opportunities for profit. This book describes a framework to identify new business opportunities. Leveraging scarce resources into new business angles can increase profit, improve the sustainability of profits, and diversify the contributors of profit, and thereby increase business value. The scarce resources considered are core competencies, brand, and multisided platforms with positive cross-group effects. Business Opportunity Thinking: Building a Sustainable, Diversified Business explains the different discovery approaches that can be taken to uncover the kernel of an idea for a new opportunity that could form part of a strategic opportunity scanning exercise. Identifying new valuable business angles can be surprisingly difficult without the aid of frameworks to navigate. One reason for this difficulty is preconceptions and biases. Business Opportunity Thinking: Building a Sustainable, Diversified Business describes three discovery approaches through which to seed new ideas about opportunities. These discovery approaches are: - Declining cost economies approach focuses on use of core competencies and products to improve business value by increasing gross margins. - Path-dependency approach has its foundations in ways to parlay scarce resources by deploying positive customer behavioural feedback effects, in addition to gaining the benefits of declining cost economies. - Nexus of markets approach confronts the reality that organisations, scarce resources they create, and assets they possess have value and can be priced and there is uncertainty in the price. Development paths are not mutually exclusive. While some development paths may not be available or relevant to all organisations, each can provide opportunities to parlay existing scarce resources.

Business Opportunity Thinking: Building a Sustainable, Diversified Business (Creating Business Angles)

Business & Money

Hughes, Robert David

Management & Leadership

Hughes Consulting Limited

Core competencies are the most important scarce resource a business can create. Core competencies stem from the business's accumulated experience, and its organisation wide systems and processes. Where these drive declining cost economies that result in the business having lower average unit costs than competitors, then it has a competitive advantage. There are several reasons for being interested in the subject of core competencies, the main ones being to: - Design ways to create new core competencies, and thereby to increase the value of the business. - Leverage existing core competencies into new business opportunities. This option is important to businesses that have created resources where the best way to monetise them is through the continuity of the business. - Maintain and increase the value of existing core competencies. This is a preoccupation of businesses faced with capital budgeting constraints and getting the right balance between the different demands for capital. - Guide business transformation in response to changes in market conditions. - Direct turnaround managers of businesses under financial stress, to identify the business's core competencies to safeguard them so they are not destroyed in the drive to re-establish profitability. Core Competencies: Real options as corporate strategy provides practical approaches, and guild to identifying and evaluating a business's core competencies and how to improve them. It also describes the different ways that core competencies can be leveraged into new business opportunities.

Core Competencies: Real options as corporate strategy (Creating Business Angles)

Multisided Platforms: Evaluating launch conditions deals with a specific type of organisation, the multisided platform that operates in multisided markets with positive feedback effects. These are some of the most exciting and valuable but rare organisations. Examples can be found in a variety of settings from postal delivery, shopping malls, print publishing, open source software projects, through to internet based social media, to name a few instances. The challenges in establishing a business venture of this type are quite unlike those faced by other organisations. Be under no illusion, the likelihood of success in creating a multisided platform with positive feedback effects is small. The reason for this is that to launch, the platform must overcome the obstacle of reaching critical mass. To do this, the platform's products must offer enough benefit to each of the multiple parties transacting over it for them to change their current behaviour and join the platform, and then want to remain on the platform. Multisided Platforms: Evaluating launch conditions describes a method to identify multisided market opportunities and assess whether there are prospects of it being developed into a multisided platform with positive feedback effects. Multisided Platforms: Evaluating launch conditions explains the positive cross-group effect, and the declining cost economies phenomena which successful platforms exploit. A framework to model the role of price in the launch of a multisided platform with positive feedback effects is described. The framework is applied to the launch challenge faced in establishing a new multisided platform.

Multisided Platforms: Evaluating launch conditions (Creating Business Angles)

Appraising Business Opportunities: The Stratisquare Framework (Creating Business Angles)

Hughes, Robert D.

The Drive of Business: Strategies for Creating Business Angles

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