The Art of Opportunity

Chapter 4

Having discovered your opportunity for new growth (Chapter 2) and designed your first iteration of the strategy for how to seize this opportunity (Chapter 3), it's time to launch and build your new business. Most firms jump right into creating a complex and overly detailed launch plan. Instead, to reduce risk and increase your likelihood of success, we suggest an iterative approach that allows you to validate, learn, and design your business in an iterative, evolving way.

The Three Phases of a New Growth Business

Our Research has Shown that successful strategic innovators go through three phases to build new growth businesses:

1. The inception phase, within which an opportunity for new growth is discovered, followed by the development of an initial idea of the strategy for how to seize this opportunity, and the validation of this idea. (This is actually where you are in your journey at the moment! Whatever strategy you have developed until now, consider it a first idea.)
2. After the successful validation of the initial idea, the new business enters the evolution phase, during which the offering, business model, and revenue model are being reworked, fine-tuned, and adapted while the new business is being operated.
3. Once the new strategy works sufficiently well, the business enters what we call the diffusion phase, during which the focus of activities shifts from designing ...