Roadmapping For Growth
Planning For Rapid Business Cycles
A Biotech company prepares for dynamic innovation
- Duration: 2012-13
- Goal: build corporate resiliency in a fast growing and changing industry
- Partners: Socius Advisory
- Deliverables: Ad hoc analyses of specific issues
- Interesting issues addressed: Strategy, Business Model, Staffing and Business Design, Product Development, Partnerships, Marketing, Capital Raising, Branding, eCommerce
Situation
Our client, one of the fastest growing cord blood companies in the US, wanted to prepare for a continual change in its industry, which is dominated by very large companies with established relationships and a few start-ups that are experimenting with the business model.
Complication
Because of changes in technology delivery, customer preference, responses by dominant competitors and unknown startups, predicting the industry’s future growth trends are very difficult.
Key question and answer
The key question for the engagement was how best to create a future-proof corporate development plan that was flexible enough to iterate with industry changes? Our answer was to build a skills-based corporate development roadmap along with a number of critical business functions.
Solution
The proposed solution focuses on two aspects of modern business: the iterative business development cycle and the fact that capabilities can be leveraged in multiple ways once created. Within a given business function, a company can create target states of readiness and skill so that it can respond effectively to changing business conditions. While the details of these target states can change, once the roadmap exists, the management can spend resources to improve the most important capabilities for the firm at a given time. Our roadmap for the client encompassed a number of critical functions and would allow the client to respond rapidly and effectively to market changes, while still meeting its own growth targets.
