The Opportunity Paradox Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

Capturing new growth opportunities is essential to strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship. Change that is improvisational, experimentation and these days are in. But how should the challenge be addressed by managers? The reply, the authors assert can be more complex and much more critical to a company's success than formerly thought. Their research on growing businesses, mature corporations and new ventures suggests a paradoxical tension between flexibility and focus that could define or break a company. What's more, they conclude that a company's focus' flexibility may be influenced by it and vice versa.

There are two components to gaining a brand new business opportunity: opportunity performance and opportunity selection. Chance selection includes determining which customer issue to solve, whereas opportunity execution deals with solving the issue. The authors point out that most novels, articles and thought leaders focus on opportunity performance -the best way to generate value by developing alternatives. But research suggests that innovation initiatives often move so swiftly to identify a remedy the innovators need to cycle back to find out which issue they are actually solving. The writers found that opportunity selection appears to matter as much as chance execution.

More importantly, how managers approach opportunity selection (with focus or whether with flexibility) has a critical effect on how successful they are at opportunity performance. The authors discovered that entrepreneurs and managers have a tendency to fall into two groups: opportunists and strategists. Opportunists rely on a less scripted and much more adaptable method of chance choice, letting emergent customer questions form chance choice. An alternate pattern is followed by strategists. They constrain the choice of chances so that they pursue opportunities that are prone to result in success, and they try to capture opportunities that are several versus one in isolation. The writers found that businesses that were more focused in chance choice were often more adaptable in chance execution.

The Opportunity Paradox Case Study Solution

PUBLICATION DATE: October 01, 2014 PRODUCT #: SMR505-PDF-ENG

This is just an excerpt. This case is about STRATEGY & EXECUTION

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