Corporate Strategy Retreats for a European Technology Company
Case study · Technology · Executive retreats
The brief
A European technology company found itself at a strategic crossroads:
- Its competitive advantage was shrinking under the R&D of much larger competitors.
- Those competitors were moving from North America into Europe, the company’s main source of revenue.
- Disruptive technologies in the sector were advancing rapidly.
- New industrial markets were opening, as opposed to consumer ones.
The company convened a series of executive retreats with a cross-functional team of experts to address what it saw as a major threat to its business model, and perhaps a greater opportunity on the other side. It engaged Competitive Futures to future-proof the next business model.
What Competitive Futures did
We accompanied the CEO and the expert team, presenting strategic-level trends that gave the larger context for their decisions. The likely outcome was not a change to a few product lines but a revolution in the strategy of the whole enterprise.
Deliverables
- Trend research: hard data on what was changing the industry, for executives absorbed in daily management.
- Market sizing: an assessment of new markets for the existing product mix, to see whether the competitive threat could be avoided.
- Scenario construction: once the threat was sized and new markets explored, the strategic choices broken out into distinct future scenarios.
Value
The retreats produced a major overhaul of corporate strategy. Leadership concluded that consumer markets were about to be dominated by a far better-resourced competitor and that growth lay in industrial, business-to-business markets for its technology. The company also moved further toward professional services, monetizing its intellectual property rather than competing on manufacturing scale.
“The great value of including Competitive Futures was a much broader, more open approach to our changes in corporate strategy. Without them, I’m sure we would have had major blind spots.”
Chief Executive Officer, technology company
More case studies: Our Work. To discuss a similar engagement, request a consultation.