This book is a must for any Business Development Manager, Corporate Strategist, R&D Director, and anyone else who is accountable for growth in a corporation. It is an easy read that is practical and not fraught with useless academic theories.”
Ron Pierantozzi, Ph.D., CEO of PPT Research and Former Director, Business Development, Air Products & Chemicals, Inc.
A Breakthrough Approach to Investing in Business Innovation
Most companies analyze investments using tools that bias them against real innovation and lead them to avoid their best opportunities. This book introduces a breakthrough alternative: Opportunity Engineering.
Drawing upon recent advances in financial analysis, but without requiring a lot of math, the authors show how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities so you can pursue more high-payoff innovations. You’ll learn how to escape from the “go/no-go vise” and implement more flexible decision-making that considers all the business alternatives, models, and opportunities associated with each project. You’ll learn how to systematically structure high-potential projects to limit downside exposure and boost your potential upside.
The authors show how to define the scope of investment opportunities, identify key drivers of potential profits, document assumptions, design out major risks, and tease out key challenges and vulnerabilities.
Using these techniques, you can escape the mindset that limits you to low-impact innovations and begin pursuing serious growth opportunities–and make business uncertainty work for you, not against you.
Why companies avoid their best opportunities for innovation
Getting past risk-averse analysis that snuffs out experimentation and innovation
Systematically engineering your opportunities
Capturing the upside, slicing out the downside
Beyond rigid “go/no-go” decisions
How flexible, staged innovation creates more opportunities for delivering value
Constructing an engineered growth portfolio of innovation investments
Optimizing your mix of core-enhancing investments and high potential “long shots”
Even in the best of times, most companies struggle to gain traction in their growth initiatives. Today the world is full of uncertainties. Many companies have become risk-averse. Others must dig their way out of a downturn. Growth is even more elusive than before – yet more necessary than ever.
How can you achieve truly dynamic growth, without risking an expensive gamble? By adopting a practical, organic “discovery driven” approach to innovation.
In Discovery-Driven Growth, authors and longtime consultants Rita McGrath and Ian MacMillan show how you can plan and pursue an aggressive growth agenda with confidence. You’ll learn how to reframe your strategic opportunities, test each project assumption against a series of specific checkpoints, and act on evidence and learning. You’ll control your costs more effectively, minimize surprises, and know when to disengage from questionable projects before it’s too late. Quite simply, McGrath and MacMillan provide the road-tested plans that you need – regardless of industry or location – to ensure maximum success with your new initiatives.
View the Discovery-Driven Growth website
Opportunities for achieving blockbuster growth don’t have to be “pie-in-the-sky” ventures. In fact, they are likely hiding in plain sight along a company’s existing business platform. Here is a revolutionary new framework for identifying and exploiting them—before competitors do
There’s no way around it. Companies must grow to survive. But the dismal failure rate of most growth strategies speaks volumes about how poorly understood—and therefore grossly mismanaged—this vital business process really is.
In this hands-on guide, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan outline a systematic, field-tested method for identifying specific types of growth opportunities, choosing the best option for a company’s competitive situation, and executing that strategy in a way that achieves spectacular growth. Best of all, the authors show that these opportunities can easily be found within a firm’s existing customer base, offerings, internal processes and competitive arena.
McGrath and MacMillan argue that the key to exploiting these opportunities lies in strategic moves they call “MarketBusters”: approaches that dramatically reconfigure profit streams in an industry and upend conventional competition. Based on an intensive three-year research program, MarketBusters reveals forty marketbusting moves used by firms to successfully transform their market spaces. The book maps these moves to five strategic lenses through which companies can analyze their current business, and includes targeted “prospecting questions” and corresponding tools to guide executives as they mine these areas for growth opportunities:
- Customers: View customers the way they view themselves, and intelligently tap into their experiences in order to change their perspective in your favor
- Products and Services: Transform your offerings to play up the positive attributes, lessen or eliminate the negative, and ultimately make your offering clearly superior to competitors’
- Redefine Your Business and Associated Key Metrics: Radically change some factor that drives performance in your industry, either to significantly boost your numbers or to help your customers become more competitive in their markets
- Anticipate or Exploit Industry Shifts: Capitalize on—or spark—a major upheaval in your industry before competitors do
- Create a New Market Space: Identify and exploit radically new opportunity spaces—whether wholly new markets or arenas your company has never competed in
The authors also describe a simple analytical tool to assist executives in ensuring they have prepared their organizations to successfully execute the chosen strategy. Vivid company examples from industries as diverse as manufacturing, software, retail, and pharmaceuticals illustrate each move in practice, and cautionary tales reveal common pitfalls that could cause well-intentioned strategies to backfire.
Filled with tools, checklists, and techniques proven to work in even the most unforgiving competitive environments, MarketBusters is the indispensable field guide to realizing sustained, profitable growth.
View the MarketBusters website
A Blueprint for Building Entrepreneurial Organizations
Nobody needs to tell you that in the new economy, managers using conventional strategies are losing out to smart, fast, entrepreneurial competitors who move on ideas others overlook and who confidently act while others dither. Are the managers of leading companies simply doomed to let this happen? Not at all, argue Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. The fundamental problem is that the tools, training, and conceptual frameworks that work for business-as-usual can’t, and don’t, work when your main challenge is to bury old business models and aggressively create completely new ones. To succeed, today’s strategists need the thought process and discipline that are second nature to successful entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow’s opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete.
Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan’s bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as “Discovery-Driven Planning,” the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset will show you how to:
- Eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished and what would be worthwhile
- Create a richly stocked opportunity register in which you mobilize great ideas for redesigning existing products, finding new sources of differentiation, resegmenting existing markets, reconfiguring market spaces, and seizing the huge upside potential of breakthroughs
- Build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future
- Execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk
- Develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization
The Entrepreneurial Mindset is about succeeding in an unpredictable world. It will help everyone from independent entrepreneurs to managers of large corporations develop insights that others overlook and act on them to build the truly entrepreneurial organizations of the future.