Business Initiative vs. Business Opportunity
In the past two years I came across a lot of confusion where our IBM Garage practitioners use the word “initiative” to represent what we usually work on in an IBM Garage.
Here is a brief definition of what a business initiative is:
“Business initiatives are typically internal or external campaigns that seek to improve an organization’s work environment, company culture or overall business strategy.”
I would describe a business initiative as the approach organizations use to frame their objectives based on deep analysis of their current state and where they expect their ideal state to be in the future.
I would also say that IBM Garage is IBM’s way to realize these business initiatives for our clients.
We partner with our clients to understand their value drivers which form the foundation of their business initiatives. We dig deeper to surface pain points that are inhibiting these value drivers and from that identify possible business opportunities that can address some of these pain points. The value generated from these business opportunities have to align with the organizational business initiatives.
So here you see why I call what we work on in IBM Garage as business opportunities and not business initiatives. We for sure align with business initiatives so the effort of the entire Garage could help a client achieve their business initiatives, but not one business opportunity by itself.
A business opportunity will go through different states in an IBM Garage and will be acted on by different roles to progress it from an idea to a full-fledged product, here are some of these states as we define them in IBM Garage: Drafted, Proposed, Reviewed, Queued, Approved, In Flight and finally Launched.
When the Garage starts in Co-create we start by conducting research to identify pain points that would frame our scope and help us narrow down our focus to key problems we could take on. So basically when we are looking at what to do in IBM Garage we are starting by identifying a business problem based on pain point observation that are observed by our researchers. We collaborate with our clients on defining these problem statements by applying Enterprise Design Thinking practices in a workshop we call the Business Opportunity Envisioning Workshop. During that workshop we review the facts from our research and draw the existing user scenarios to identify inefficiencies or opportunities for improvement. We would brain storm on the various areas we can improve, frame the top ideas as business opportunities, prioritize these and validate the top ideas with sponsor users. As we validate the problem hypothesis, and learn more about all aspects of the business opportunity we would usually frame it into more details using a Business Opportunity Canvas consisting of 16 dimensions that cover every part of the business opportunity and is used to present the business opportunity to the IBM Garage Board to get their approval.
Under that business opportunity we could form several problem hypotheses that we would then validate with sponsor users. Some of these would be proven inconsiderable and would be ignored, some of these would be considerable and would warrant solving.
Following Lean Startup practices we would prototype some of these business problems through what we call a Golden Thread. The Golden Thread allows us to communicate a common understanding of the problem hypothesis and possible solutions that could eliminate that problem completely or partially. These solutions are considered features of a product that we would incorporate in an MVP to prove in the market, before we scale them in the actual product.
So in short one business initiative could be realized of several business opportunities that are coherent in nature. And each of these business opportunities could be realized through MVPs that validate their applicability to the market. The most important aspect is the business value generated and that is what we use to measure ROI for the business initiative as a collation of the ROI form each of its business opportunities.
Before I close, let me also shed a different light on this prominent confusion. I am not saying that IBM Garage can’t work on business initiatives, for sure IBM Garage can be also used to help clients identify the business initiatives they need to work on to achieve their ideal state, but I would say the key value of an IBM Garage is tackling these business initiatives and realizing quantifiable business value for our clients by realizing business opportunities that make up these business initiatives.
Let me know in your comments what you think about my point of views on Business Initiatives and Business Opportunities, and the key value of IBM Garage.
Learn more at ibm.com/garage.
