Riding a wave while catching the next

How to be aware of the next big opportunity? Our client was doing very well within the semiconductor industry, with a successfully growing business. However, the senior manager in charge of new business was concerned: “We are doing well now, but how do I minimize the risk of NOT catching the next wave in my rapidly changing market?¨

Internally, everyone was fully involved with fulfilling the requirements of current cash-flow generating clients, meaning that an internal task force would not be able to focus on the exploration of future business to find ¨the next big thing¨. Therefore our client assigned B&W to execute a broad scan of business opportunity areas, covering the first stages of exploration with a 100% external consultancy team. The internal experts became involved only after 3 concrete business cases had been extracted from the 45 initially identified opportunities.

For each of the initial 45 areas, B&W organized visits to selected potential customers, attended key industry-specific events and facilitated the introduction of key staff members to highly specialized networks. Then we proceeded with the development of the 3 concrete business cases that were presented to the business unit executive board. The result? Not only could our client sleep much better, he furthermore got the green light to develop two of the three promising business cases into new tens-of-million euro businesses. And one of these ended up being exactly the next big wave.