3.6 KiB
Growth Strategy
These frameworks organize growth hypotheses. Pair them with customer research, operational feasibility, financial scenarios, and applicable regulatory analysis.
Ansoff Matrix
Attribution: H. Igor Ansoff, "Strategies for Diversification" (1957).
Classify an option by product novelty and market novelty:
| Existing market | New market | |
|---|---|---|
| Existing offering | Market penetration | Market development |
| New offering | Product development | Diversification |
The matrix is a vocabulary for discussing uncertainty, not a ranking of risk or a forecast of results. For any quadrant, assess the relevant unknowns: customer need, willingness to pay, distribution, capabilities, competition, regulation, capital, reversibility, and learning path. The materiality of each unknown depends on the specific option.
Three Horizons
Attribution: the Three Horizons framework is associated with Baghai, Coley, and White's The Alchemy of Growth (1999).
Treat the horizons as concurrent maturity states, not calendar buckets:
| Horizon | Maturity state | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| H1 | Established activities | What sustains and improves current value creation? |
| H2 | Emerging growth activities | What evidence would show the activity can become repeatable or material? |
| H3 | Exploratory options | What uncertainty is being investigated, and what would justify further learning or stopping? |
An initiative can move between states as evidence changes. Choose allocation, governance, metrics, ownership, and review moments according to strategic importance, constraints, uncertainty, and decision reversibility. Do not infer a required allocation from the framework.
Market Entry
Entry modes can include building organically, acquiring, partnering, forming a joint venture, licensing, or other arrangements. Their commitment, risk exposure, control, speed, and reversibility are contextual, shaped by the market, counterparties, regulation, capabilities, financing, and desired learning.
Before deciding, investigate:
- Which customer segment, use case, and unmet need form the initial thesis?
- What evidence supports demand, pricing, channel access, and ability to serve the market?
- Which incumbents, substitutes, partners, legal constraints, and local conditions matter?
- What would a plausible competitive response look like?
- Which capabilities are owned, missing, or better accessed through a partner?
- What investment, operating assumptions, decision points, and exit or adaptation paths are acceptable?
Avoid treating market size as sufficient evidence, assuming a uniform competitor response, or presenting a mode of entry as an all-or-nothing commitment. Use scenario analysis to surface downside, upside, and adaptation paths.
Growth-Options Artifact
For every option under consideration, capture:
- The customer, offering, market, and maturity assumptions that determine how it is classified.
- Evidence already available and the unknowns that matter most.
- Required capabilities, channels, partners, capital, approvals, and organizational attention.
- Strategic fit and interaction with established, emerging, and exploratory activities.
- Reversible learning steps, decision points, and conditions for expanding, adapting, pausing, or stopping.
- Downside, base, and upside scenarios with assumptions rather than unsupported point forecasts.
- The decision owner, recommendation, dissenting view, and next evidence-gathering action.
Compare options on decision-relevant dimensions. Do not convert Ansoff quadrants, horizon labels, or entry modes into an automatic ranking.