Develop Competitive Advantage
This beginning-to-end process will help you identify opportunities, generate ideas and develop prototypes to build powerful competitive advantage.
If you want to be more successful in business, you need to have at least one reason for customers to choose you rather than your competitors. The more reasons you have, the more likely you are to succeed. It’s pretty obvious. Yet few businesses have a clear competitive advantage in their market.
I’ve created this three-stage programme to help you develop a competitive advantage and unlock more opportunities for your business.
How we'll get competitive advantage
I’ll act as your guide throughout the process. I’ll harness the expertise of your team and direct their thinking in the right way to get the best ideas.
The process is split into three stages:
STAGE 1
EXPLORE THE OPPORTUNITY
I’ll work with you to research your market and identify where the opportunities lie. We’ll look at the competitive landscape, explore what’s happening in other industries, learn about new technology and get an understanding of what would motivate your audience. The output of this stage is a document that shows where the opportunities lie along with recommendations on how we can turn them into competitive advantage.
STAGE 2
GENERATE IDEAS
We’ll take the output from the first phase and use that to develop a brief that will give us the best chance of generating ideas that will open up the opportunity. Doing this requires some research and a good amount of strategic thinking. We’ll then curate a team to work on it and use a number of techniques to generate ideas. We’ll then select the best ideas with the most potential to have an impact on your business.
STAGE 3
DEVELOP AND TEST
This final stage is all about taking the best ideas and making them a reality. We’ll select two or three of the best ideas and develop them to make them stronger. We’ll then create basic prototypes of the ideas to help us understand how to implement them. And we’ll use these prototypes to conduct some research to get an indication of how the ideas might perform. Then it’s time for you to make some big decisions.
One step at a time
You’re not expected to sign up for the entire three-step process from the beginning.
We’ll run each stage as separate projects with definite beginnings, endings and deliverables.
You can stop at any time. But I don’t think you’ll want to.
what you get from the activity
But there are some other advantages you’ll get from the activities.
understanding of opportunities
Our explorations will give you a better understanding of the areas where you can build competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Ideas you can implement
After generating lots of ideas, we’ll focus on the very best ones. We’ll then spend time working out how to best implement them.
Prototypes for testing
We’ll spend time making simple prototypes of the ideas. We can then test these on a small scale to get an indication of their effectiveness.
Increased staff engagement
You’ll be demonstrating that you’re interested in the thoughts of staff across your organisation. Which is hugely motivating.
Who is this for?
C-suite
Building real competitive advantage across the company is most effective when it comes from the very top.
Head of Division
If you want to focus on a division or department, it’s always best to deal with the person heading it up.
head of product
This exercise is great for refining existing products or developing new ones based on audience insights.
head of marketing
This process works well for identifying opportunities in the marketing landscape that will help your brand stand out.
GET YOUR OWN COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Who runs the activity?
The entire process is currently run by Dave Birss, who is also the person who designed the programme. (And that shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve looked at this page’s web address.)
Dave is a former advertising creative director who picked up lots of awards for his work during his years in the industry. For the last ten years, he’s been teaching, speaking and writing books on creativity and innovation. As well as consulting for companies to help them get better ideas out of their teams.
Dave has taught at universities all over the world, from London to New York, Santiago to Singapore. And he’s currently developing a couple of courses for LinkedIn Learning which are scheduled for release in early 2020.
He created this course as a way of using innovation thinking in a more immediately practical way to help senior leaders make an impact on their business.
TRUSTED BY BIG BUSINESSES
