Home
If you’re interested in New Business Development you have come to the right place. Size of your business doesn’t matter, from entrepreneur to Fortune 100 you will find something here.
Some of the key challenges in new business development revolve around the front end of the development curve. Geoffrey Moore wrote a book titled, “Crossing the Chasm” where he presents the hypothesis of a “chasm” between early adopters of product/technologies and the early majority. Geoffrey utilized the five segments that Everett Rogers defined in “Diffusion of Innovations“:
Click on the images to enlarge.
The key activities for front end work are focused on the innovators and early adopters. Identifying this audience allows for the opportunity to find partners whom you can discuss, sample and sometimes co-develop with.
The “chasm”, or canyon are common ways to express the gap that typically occur as an opportunity moves from idea, to beta testing, and finally 1st generation. Most opportunities start to make money when they can sell to the early majority, however as represented by the chasm, this is often a hurdle facing many technologies. Being able to move from an early stage innovation to a main stream product is not trivial.
Looking at the typical industry life cycle it is clear that any new innovation needs to be pointing to the Early and Growth stages to maximize investment and growth.
Pipelines are another fundamental building block that are often neglected or abandoned. Small or large companies need to feed their Ideas to Launch system with new ideas and prune ideas or projects that no longer meet the goals or have had major milestone issues. Too many times bad (pet) projects are allowed to continue because the pipeline is empty and managers defend a project when the real result is they don’t have any new opportunities to move their people too. A healthy pipeline has a fair amount of turnover at the front end. To quote a scientist I once knew, “Technology always looks the best the first time you see it”, meaning the more you study and learn about something you will find the strengths, trade-offs and limitations that were not readily apparent the first time.
More to follow in future weeks!!