A Strategic Challenge - Define Your Ideal Competitor

Try this management exercise. Take your group and divide them into teams of four to six people. The brief is simple. Imagine that an immensely wealthy corporation has decided to enter your business market and plans to create a powerful competitor that will use innovative approaches to seize your customers and wipe you out. It will deliberately exploit your weaknesses to hurt you in the marketplace. This corporation has hired your team to put together the new competitor and given you immense resources. What would you do?

Each team has to brainstorm innovative ways of reaching the customer, delivering better services and seizing a leading market share. They start with a clean slate; with none of the legacies, encumbrances or excuses that are holding you back. They can adopt any technology they want and have virtually unlimited resources. Once the constraints are off it is much easier to conceive of radical, innovative business models.

To take this process to the next stage ask each team to choose a model and then to answer various questions. What does the business model look like? How would they reach clients? What would be their unique sales proposition? What kind of organisation would be best placed to exploit this? And finally, what should we be doing about this?

The teams present back their ideas and the moderator decides on a winner. The emphasis is placed on creative business models, new routes to market and other radical ideas rather than undercutting on price or out-spending on promotions. Obviously many of the ideas generated are ones that your organization should be investigating urgently before a real 'ideal competitor' emerges.

Paul Sloane facilitates high-level meetings and helps organisations improve innovation. He is the author of The Innovative Leader.

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