Introduction

1. Prologue

Many industries and many companies face the same challenge: how do you secure and grow the future of your company? The question gets pressing at a time when almost every day brings new technological possibilities, new competitors in your own or neighbouring industries, and political developments that can call your entire business model into question. To this day, many companies have found no answer that matches the scale of these challenges and the speed they demand. They respond with classic approaches that worked well for decades. Most of these approaches focus on optimising the existing business model. Streamline production. Make logistics more efficient. Introduce a CRM system. Define standards. Train employees in project and quality management. Nothing wrong with that.

Here is the "but": Optimisation of today's business will certainly cut costs and improve your EBITDA margin within certain limits. But it won't bring significant (3-10x) growth, prosperity or a secure future. If you don't invest in growth and innovation today, your existing business won't just stagnate. It will erode. This is not a bold statement – you can already see it in a wide range of industries across countries. Alongside optimising their existing business, companies need to learn a new discipline, one they can run just as systematically as logistics or production. That discipline is: developing innovation and growth in uncertain times.

What companies need today are entrepreneurial leaders with a "strategic idea" for their company – leaders who take risks and deal with uncertainty (see Leadership). What companies need today are employees who understand this idea, rally behind it and, given the freedom and the capabilities to act, put it into practice and create growth (see Work Culture). And they need a "system" that helps leaders and employees act accordingly, every day. That is why we have invented Business Design.

2. Business Design in a Nutshell

Business Design is an agile end-to-end innovation and growth management approach that works best when you are confronted with many uncertainties while building something new. Irrespective of whether you are about to develop a new Business Model, product, service or software application, the Business Design approach guides you through a structured but flexible innovation journey and helps you find your next big opportunity beyond the resources you currently control. "End-to-end" means that Business Design covers the entire journey from your vision of your company all the way to new revenue.

The Business Design approach consists of five key elements, which support you to become a successful innovator.

All elements of Business Design are introduced and explained in the knowledge base. Check out these links for further details.

• Guiding Principles

• End-to-End Innovation Process

• Roles

• Organisational Context

• Tools & Methods

• AI Library

3. Entering New Territories

In Business Design, we love to explore new spaces and unveil surprising insights that will ultimately lead to new ideas and innovation. Innovation is not so much about creativity as it is about building ideas based on facts that are not broadly known or widely considered in product and service design. Knowing what others don't and turning this advantage into promising innovation at high speed is what counts. "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." is what William Gibson wrote a long time ago. And if the "future" is our future, a future we desire, then this statement makes a lot of sense. To fulfil that promise, from day 1 in Business Design, we look at five perspectives to build new business that works:

• Strategic and organisational fit: Business Design aims to create innovation that fits well with the strategic vision and envisioned capabilities of a company

• Desirability: Business Design aims to create innovation that fits well with today's or future world of customers and users

• Viability: Business Design aims to create innovation that helps achieve economic targets

• Feasibility: Business Design aims to create innovation that can be engineered and produced under certain economic conditions

• Sustainability: Business Design aims to create innovation that doesn't harm the society or life of future generations (by the way, this is not just "blah blah" but an aspect we take very seriously)

4. End-to-End Approach

Business Design is a holistic innovation management approach. Innovation can thrive if a company has a "system" in place that defines and supports the entire journey from vision to revenue — end to end. Very often we see highly fragmented innovation processes with different, sometimes inconsistent, approaches not linked together in a smooth and integrative way. Business Design is different. We have built this system from scratch based on 15 years of experience in innovation management. Business Design is the result of this experience and is now publicly available to everybody who aims to run successful innovation projects and wants to implement a modern innovation management system that works and delivers.

Business Design works alongside an End-to-End Innovation Process consisting of the following phases:

1. Phase I: Picture of the Future & Strategy

2. Phase II: Playgrounds & Exploration

3. Phase III: Portfolio & Evaluation

4. Phase IV: Validation & Refinement

5. Phase V: Execution & Go-to-Market

Business Design starts with visionary work and strategy. Without a vision — we call it a Picture of the Future — and a clear strategy, innovation projects can't work. But we don't stop there. As said before, successful innovation requires covering the entire journey, not just some selected steps. These five phases are the answer to any innovation challenge.

5. Systematic Learning

Business Design is based on the idea of an agile learning process to create innovation. What does that mean? We don't believe that successful innovation (which is defined as something "new" determined to generate "growth") can be built in a traditional business development approach in which Project Teams go through a linear process of learning (= market research through customer surveys), planning (= business case modelling), decision-making (= management decision to allocate budget), building (e.g. burning the budget until it is gone) and finally launching the innovation on the market.

The likelihood is very low, however, that both the Project Team and C-Level Managers are able to anticipate the future and hit the bull's eye with their decisions. The world is fast, customers' behaviour diverse and uncertainties high (by the way, "uncertainties" are not "risks", since risks are controllable and somewhat predictable). This is why Business Design puts the traditional development process upside down and turns it into an agile development and learning process. Through short iterations, a project team enabled and facilitated by an experienced coach quickly makes progress with tangible results and reduces uncertainties through systematic learning. The management (= Project Sponsor) is invited to make decisions not only once but many times throughout the journey to literally steer an innovation project to the market — step by step.

6. When It Fits — and When It Doesn't

Business Design is built for innovation, growth and uncertainty. The higher your growth ambition and the uncertainty, the more you get out of it. If you don't know yet who your customers are, what they would pay for or whether the business behind your idea adds up, this is your approach. It is the wrong tool in three situations. When you already know what to build and only need it built, run a development project — iterating on a settled question costs time and buys nothing. When the open question is purely technical, send an engineer, not a team. And when management wants to decide once and then be left alone until launch, stop before you start: an approach that puts a decision at the end of every phase needs a Project Sponsor who turns up for all of them.

Be honest about this during the setup, not three months in. The approach is strong where the questions are open. It is overhead where they are not.

7. Where to Start

This knowledge base is large. Where you go next depends on the role you are about to take.

• You will coach a team: Start with Team Coach and read Hacks for Team Coaches before your first workshop.

• You will sponsor a project: Start with Project Sponsor and Measurement of Success & Progress — together they decide whether your project gets steered or merely funded.

• You will work in the team: Start with Team Member, then walk through Phase I and follow the process from there.

• You want to build the system: Start with Context and System Playbook.

If none of these fits yet, read the Guiding Principles next. A handful of sentences tell you how we work — and let you decide whether you want to work that way. Then start the journey where every project starts: with a Picture of the Future.

8. Epilogue

Successful innovation and growth take more than tools & templates, workshops, good coaches and motivated employees. It takes a highly efficient "system": one that establishes a new way of thinking and working in your organisation. That system is made of Principles that guide every decision, clear Roles such as Team Coach and Project Sponsor, modern Leadership, a Governance that sets the rhythm of decisions, an End-to-End Process and the Tools & Methods to work through it and complement each other. Everything else is window dressing. That is what we have learned at Orange Hills over the past 20 years. Welcome to the world of Business Design.

Enjoy the ride!