Guest post by George Nelson

Is your competitor about to steal your audience?

Surviving and thriving in 2014 is about designing prospective strategy and exploiting business opportunity.

Strategy, which drives all organisations, has for over a century rested on a tried and tested approach that has generated the same results. It is the organisations that are bold and do things differently that benefit from the norm of complacent strategic practice.

Strategy is simply driving an organisation from point A to point B. Fashioned with a vision and powered by a mission, its success is measured by the accomplishment of goals and survival in industry. However the strategy is informed by data, which is sourced from retrospective performance. So in this way it is much like driving the company forward but navigating by using the rear vision mirror.

Business Opportunity Strategy is the ability to expand such hindsight however to make room for insight and foresight. Prospective Strategy is potent and powerful. It is built on the Design Intelligence Framework. Design is about the creation of solutions for tomorrow that don’t yet exist today. Design has an undoubtedly prospective quality. Design Thinking and Design Intelligence are not about manufacturing or technology, they are about being able to inform your enterprise’s strategic vision with prospective data and innovation.

In order to maximise Business Development in 2014, every Australian Enterprise will need to adopt a Design Leadership position. Each organisation will need to design a prospective Strategy. One that will be able to influence the audience and drive the enterprise into new markets and take greater market share. Because if you don’t your competitor will. In fact globally our competitors offshore are already adopting this Business Development approach and stealing your audience.

Somewhere in the early ‘noughties’ Apple decided to enter the mobile phone market. While Nokia, Hutchinson, Motorola, RIM, and Samsung where complacently following each other’s ‘planned obsolescence’ strategy, Apple was designing a mobile phone built for a future audience – a user of the late noughties. A mobile user who needed only one button, a touch pad interface, global connectivity, personalised applications. Apple then built a strategy of enterprise around this design and in 2007 it stole over 80% of the market share.

Design of prospective strategy can be very potent. It can, like Apple, obliterate the competition and catapult your enterprise to industry juggernaut.

George Nelson is the CEO of Design Intelligence Strategy consultants, Opportunity Logistics. Opportunity Logistics has been building prospective strategy for over 15 years for government, stock-listed firms, SMEs and community organisations.