Tools

Dynamic Strategies employ many simple but powerful models to help executives and their teams understand where they are now and to better define their objectives, plans and priorities.

Rapid growth and especially startup entrepreneurship, has attracted an enormous amount of attention and is starting to be accepted as a credible source of national economic stimulus, as countries and regions around the world adjust to conditions post the devastating COVID pandemic and increasing impacts of climate change.

Whilst many of the concepts behind rapid growth are not new, such as ensuring early demand is well met by a satisfying customer experience and that system and process are designed with this experience in mind, recent years have seen the definition of some useful tools and frameworks.

Some of the most valuable include:

The Business Model Canvas

A clear and focused business model is crucial for any enterprise aspiring to rapid growth.

A simple and quite powerful, business model generation tool set has been created by Osterwalder, Pigneur and an international collaboration team and is generously shared by them at the Strategyzer site.

A graphic version of a “Plan on a Page” the canvas has 9 boxes representing the interrelated elements of every successful business and forms an invaluable framework for designing and refining business models.

Strategyzer have also developed expansions of the canvas including the Value Proposition canvas to zoom in on elements of the model. Combined with test and learn, the canvas becomes a structure for sophisticated validation and refinement of any business.

Here’s a video overview from Strategyzer, of the canvas and how to use it.

Lean

Rapid prototyping, Lean, Agile, Test and learn. There are plenty of names for the approach but essentially it boils down to starting with a guess or an hypothesis, building a simple model or prototype and going and engaging with real prospects, real people who you hope are suffering pain and will want to buy your solution.

With broad experience working with corporates, NGOs and government, Dynamic Strategies has applied innovation prototyping in many circumstances. From workflow re-engineering or marketing campaign delivery, to service innovation and large change programs. Our special combination of hands on executive experience with the tools and methods like Lean, can help your organisation to find novel ways to succeed and grow.

Customer Development

Following an entrepreneurial run of more than 20 years and 8 startups, 4 of which went public, Steve Blank was invited to lecture on startups by Jerry Engel and the rest, as they say, is history.

First there was the “Four Steps to the Epiphany” setting out the approach and method that had been the core of success for one of Steve’s more successful businesses, E.piphany.

Working with Blank and applying Four Steps and customer development in a systematic manner, Eric Ries then developed the Lean Startup approach.

When Steve (Blank) met Alex (Osterwalder) it was the start of something quite special and spawned an article in Harvard Business Review “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything” May 2013.

Stages of Maturity – Startups

For startups, Blank has a definition that I associate with strongly, “a startup is a temporary organisation searching for a repeatable and scalable business model.”

He has created a simple maturity framework with three key stages: