“Success is 20% skills and 80% strategy.
You might know how to read, but more
importantly, what’s your plan to read?”
-Jim Rohn
Introduction
Edge strategy or Strategic edge as sometimes may be called sometimes is very paramount for every business as this helps such companies to be able to maximize more profit and dominate their business environment. Edge strategy offerings are better in harmony with specific consumer needs, customer experience, and improvement of core procedures in every business. Attaining business success in any given economic scene can be an intimidating duty. The job may become a bit at ease when every activity, function, and team is associated with the company’s long-range business strategy.
As a business owner or manager, you need to remain focused, remain on your proven processes, especially in today’s unstable and unsure economic and business environment which is stuffed with vagueness and unexpected transformation. The forces driving us to stay focused on our main business are exceptionally influential and large. It should be noticed that benefiting from the core business is prime but the danger is that an excessive amount of specialization in the core business can blind the company. Skimming through the horizon for innovative markets and new products can even be alluring, but sometimes risky. Focusing an excessive amount on or the opposite strategy may lead to missing the numerous prospects for growth which are most times concealed in plain sight, at the edge of the core business.
Edge Strategy expresses a mindset that supports leaders to recognize and maximize available opportunities. The Edge Strategy framework experiments with how the limitations of your prevailing products and services map to your customers’ views of the planet. If you’re not innovating on the sting, then you’re gripping an unwarranted amount of space. That’s the perception for pacesetters in Edge Strategy; “a brand new Mindset for Profitable Growth” by Alan Lewis and Dan McKone.
The book starts with the real and candid insight that innovation is not profitable, incremental innovations over and over again consist of blending out product variants that muddle markets, impair margins, and cannibalize its sales. At the conflicting extreme, disruptive ‘Blue Ocean’ innovation could be a high-risk and high-cost innovation strategy distressed by failure. But there’s a 3rd option between ‘stick to the core’ and ‘Blue Ocean’ innovation, which is to innovate at the Edge. A footing innovation strategy involves re-thinking the restrictions of your business and innovating close enough to existing activities to govern you with competence-based benefits which are yet new enough to own significant upside. Reporting the results of a three-year international analysis of innovation strategies of Five hundred and eighty-five topmost brands, Lewis and McKone also proved that those adopting a foothold innovation strategy have grown Thirty-nine percent over other competitors and delivered a Fifteen percent higher shareholder return. So what’s exactly is that the Edge?
Companies across the world are making constant efforts making attempts to scale-up, and it is never a surprise that countless of the companies ran into difficulties when doing so as many thing that out to be in place are left out. Finding a blue ocean strategy in today’s market is virtually difficult, not to talk of breeding new products and services which will arise with range of risks that over and over again don’t bring good yield. It should be noted that mergers, acquisitions, and product launches are frequently the way establishments go to get fresh revenue streams, several businesses do not recognize that looking within their organizations can reveal innovative revenue ways that exist before now in the company due to the company’s core business. This is known as an Edge Strategy.
Meaning of Edge Strategy
An edge strategy mindset may be seen as a disciplined methodical approach to growth that focuses on opportunities often hiding in plain sight at the sting of the core business. Edge Strategy facilitates leaders to see and evaluate each of the various “edges” then apply strategic and tactical solutions in specific business contexts. The framework includes a ten-step process that executives and managers can use to seek out and leverage the sides in their own companies.
Edge Strategy offers a foot path to business growth by getting more yield (profit) from both current and non-current assets already in situation, relationships which are established, investments that are made.
There are three key edge strategy approaches during which business owners may explore, and every examine opportunities outside of this “customer permission set”. The requirements that customers would permit your company to affect. Edge strategy approaches are built on top of prevailing assets to regulate current capabilities and accomplishments which later will generally cause higher profit margins with lower risk than other growth alternatives which the business manager might want to explore.
How to Find Your Edge
The quintessence of Edge innovation is not difficult to figure out as it involves looking out to the edges of one’s current business and getting fresh methods to monetize your two (2) core assets, your customers and your competencies. It’s a bony innovation strategy that originates from two key exercises. Creating an Asset Inventory involves the entirety of the core assets and competencies of your business or your brand and evaluate yourself, who is different and would pay for these assets or abilities?
Understanding the Job-to-Be-Done.
Endeavour to understand what individuals are making efforts to achieve when they patronize your main offers and enquire from yourself which other thing would they be willing to buy so as to achieve that which they aim at initially?
Three Edges. Once you have perfectly complete these foundation exercises, Lewis and Dan McKone suggests that you should develop your bordering business vision by paying attentions to three different kinds of Edge innovation opportunities. They are:-
Product Edges:
Innovation opportunities dwell on enhancing the general value consumer experiences which supersede customer satisfaction as it will bring more turnover which will yield better profit once the customers purchases your core product or service. Typically, they are add-ons or simple upgrades that the silent majority are willing to buy at a given price. Product Edge innovation entails enquiring a simple question: what is the function expected from my product that my end user is in the long run hoping to accomplish with my product, and if they would allow our company to help more toward achieving this end? In an analysis of the product edge innovations, the authors of the books “Edge Strategy” found out that efficacious product edge innovations actually falls under one among six (6) categories:-
“Convenience – paid accessories or add-ons that save time and energy in your core offer; think Hertz offering prepaid fuel
Comfort – paid accessories or add-ons that enhance the convenience and enjoyability of the major offering; think more leg-room options offered by airlines like JetBlue
Relief – paid accessories or add-ons that relieve pain-points within the core offering; think caller-ID for phones
Peace of mind – paid accessories or add-ons that improve the anxiety associated with the core offering, think guaranty and warranty.
Passion – paid accessories or add-ons that expand the experience of the core offering; think behind the scenes.
Knowledge – helping accessories or additional services that enhance the core offering through education or training.”
Journey Edges:
Innovation opportunities that lie on the timeline edge of your core product or service, either instantly earlier or later. For instance, staple foods supermarkets experience an increase in people coming in to purchase food either for instantaneous ingesting or for later, so they have in place a ready food counter and put in place also a café area in their stores for people or customers who choose or desire to have ready foods. This Edge innovation has brought about a 10% increase in their revenue which now generates nearly half the company’s profit (A good example is Shoprite Stores). On the other hand, accountancy or audit firms have noticed that equally previously and afterward of accounting services, their clients require consulting services which may be about Tax, Ghost Shopping, Management advisory, etc. Therefore, they have set up Edge offers accordingly to cater to that aspect. More generally, wrapping pre-and post-purchase services around are core offers that turn “do it yourself” into “do it for me” to have effective Journey Edge innovation opportunities in place for more profit and productivity.
Enterprise Edges:
Edge Strategy bids a footpath to business growth by getting more yield (profit) from both current and non-current assets already in place, relationships that are established, investments that are made. There are three key edge strategy approaches during which business owners may explore, and each observes opportunities outside of this “customer permission set”. The necessities that customers would permit your company to affect. Edge strategy approaches are built on top of prevailing assets to control current capabilities and undertakings which later will generally cause higher profit margins for the company bearing the least possible risk compared to growth alternatives which the business manager might want to explore as they intend to make more profits.
Here are two ways you can employ an edge strategy to your organization:
Think outside the box
As companies go in search of new revenue ways, many often find that their own products provide untapped opportunities for extra revenue. Especially as consumer demands change for a way they require to consumer products, it’s important that you’re always watching your business in several ways. For example, in a situation whereby your company offers products and services separately for different prices. Consider selling your products and services in packaged form, charging at a tier level, and packaging products together? How about procreating a sincere program or adding a finance expert which will bring about more cost? These are just a couple of samples of things organizations do, each coming with minimal cost and risk to your business. You’ll get to tweak something here and there, but you’re not deviating from the core of your business – you’re simply looking to the sting of it.
Install safeguards
In today’s online world, the risk of scam is tremendously high, particularly with the popularity of online transactions globally which results in corporate and individual account hack. Although the progress of online shopping (ordering) has begot new life and better opportunity into the industries across the world. It also has brought about many extra ideas for things a lot of companies wouldn’t even on a normal day have thought about. For an instance, if you give to an employee price cut programs, then you try to conduct fraud assessment to acknowledge who is really taking benefit of these discounts? It is more rampant than you can ever imagine because most employees offers these price cut to friends and relatives, which in turn implies that eligible customers are not receiving from the company which will later have effect on the company revenue.
The Bulls Capital Take
Bulls Capital as an innovation company with foremost creative consulting in Nigeria, we are boastful of being a “forward-thinking and future edge” company with huge ability to bring out the niche for our client, by helping them explore the edge strategy innovation to capture more revenue which will later yield more sales. We are logically drawn to the Edge Strategy knowing what it is capable of achieving for our clients. Our work often looks to the Edges of how individuals are consuming products and accessing services today so as to get evolving needs and opportunities out there for our clients. It should be noted that the edge of consumption is not the only edge that is available, so the Edge Strategy is another which focuses on trim edges which are closer to home that is sometimes more commercially set. In a global scene where innovation is expected to be very efficient and as well effective as creativity drive, it may convincing that financial sense will be needed to monetize existing consumers and capabilities built-in new ways, rather than observing to obtain new customers and new proficiencies.
It is our belief in Matog Consulting that strategy should be more lucid in nature as it is for both directions, moving down from the top ladder as well as moving from the bottom which is junior staff to the up. In nutshell, we say the strategy is everybody’s duty in the organization. Everybody should understand the business strategy so as to drive towards the same goal, this will help them fuse better into the company as they will be able to contribute new ideas, and actually articulate and implement the strategy in a practical way at every level in the company.
It should come to mind that when all of the strategy bits come together, a company can make a diverse experience or a cheaper solution for the end-users, which later means empowering the firm to finance in research and development, they also give incentive to shareholders and workers or even charge less for the same amount of product or service being offered by its opponents in the business.
WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU:-
- We employ our knowledge of Edge Strategy in consulting to build framework to support your business to identify merger and acquisition targets with substantial combined effect.
- We are always glad to assist leading your company to bring about more profit via the introduction and enhancement of several additional service offerings to your existing business.
- Our consulting firm will also chair innovation ideas and strategy session behind great company’s success here in Nigeria and abroad bearing in mind transformative and creative initiative as a way to offer customers more interesting experience which in turn will yield more profits.
- We will assist your company to unlock edge opportunities that will enable you grow both in revenue and customers. We assist you in generating noticeable and incremental revenue.
- As a Nigerian business in both in wholesale and retailer trade, you can enjoy from our great expertise in edge strategy to develop a series of new service offering that has will make you acquire more stake and profit.
- Companies are also helped them to optimize their offerings which intend giving values to their customers.
- We can help your company with Edge Strategy needs
- We help you work out great margins on your edge product offering than the core.
- We help you with edge strategy that uncovers target unmet customer needs to grow profits and increase customer satisfaction.
Learn how we can help you with edge strategy needs
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