Page 97 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

84 grow from within

Answer each question in both qualitative and quantitative
ways. When you’re done, you should have both a quantitative
cost/benefit analysis and a set of qualitative costs and benefits
from the customer’s perspective. You can use this knowledge to

1. Guide the definition and development of your offering,
business design, and development plan. Your team can
design the business to enhance the benefits and decrease
the costs from the customer’s perspective, not just add
more features.
2. Ensure that your new business supports robust marketing
strategy and messages. An up-front focus on customer
value aligns the activities of both the development and
marketing teams. You’ll be more likely to create something
that your sales teams can sell.

When you do this well, everyone knows what’s being devel-
oped and how it’s going to be sold. Rigorous definition of
value propositions takes more time than most people expect,
and certainly more time than most companies spend. Taking
this rigorous approach ensures that you’re always thinking
about customer value while building your new business,
which is why new business teams should take the time up front.
This is not something to work through once you’re nearing
launch.
Remember that whatever you believe the costs and benefits
to be, until you have definitive data to prove it, you’ve just got
hypotheses. Treat them as such. Build your development plan
to test these value proposition hypotheses. This could include
surveys—asking people what they want—but you don’t really
know what someone will pay and how much total value peo-
ple will perceive until they are actually paying you for it. Peo-
ple will say one thing and do something else. Keep this in mind