Page 94 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Ne w Business Design 81

What’s in it Why is this What does What might
for me? solution better? it cost? go wrong?

Benefits Costs
Promise Differentiation Price Risk

Support Effort required

Why should I Target customer: What are my costs of
believe you? making it useful?
Is this for me?
Starting point (context): Customer needs and pain points

Figure 2-3 Defining Value Propositions

more effectively about what you’re building and how to
communicate it. Fred Smith’s original promise at FedEx was
overnight, on time, secure delivery. This presented a range of
business model and capabilities design challenges that the
company finally met to become the industry leader. Define
your promise succinctly, and make sure that it is meaningful to
the customer. Hopefully, you’ll spend most of your time
designing your products, services, and business models to
support this promise.

Why Is This Solution Better? Explain what meaningfully
differentiates your solution from the competition or from
alternative solutions. Your competition is not always what you
might think. For instance, the immensely successful online
customer relationship management (CRM) service provider
Salesforce.com recognized its competition as being not only
complex, expensive offerings from large CRM providers like
Siebel Systems but also the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets,
Microsoft Word documents, or other tools that many sales and