Strategic Thinking Exercise – 17 Questions to Find Innovation Case Studies

I’ve lost count of how many times I have heard business people say and then try to explain why their particular companies are unique. By this, they typically mean there is no possibility any other company faces the same types of challenges and operational issues they deal with daily.

While that might be a comforting perspective if you’re fond of business isolationism, it’s rarely true once you start to explore the business strategically.

We were working recently with a company that, based on its competitive and business situation, could certainly lay some claim to having a unique business situation. But given our unwillingness to settle for that easy answer, we created a rapid fire strategic thinking exercise to push for ideas and analogies.

Our immediate need was to identify potential innovation case studies to discover how other companies and industries are innovating in relevant ways.

Strategic Thinking Exercise – 17 Questions to Find Innovation Case Studies

Within about ten minutes, using the seventeen questions in this strategic thinking exercise, a group of nine or ten people generated more than seventy possible companies and industries to explore for comparable innovation case studies.

If you are facing a similar challenge to generate relevant strategic connections to your business, here is your starting point for a comparable Brainzooming strategic thinking exercise:

1. What companies have similar sizes and org structures to ours?
2. Who are our strategic partners?
3. Who are our primary competitors?
4. What companies provide substitutes for what we offer to customers?
5. What other companies serve the same customers we do?
6. What other companies have similar strategies to ours?
7. What industries have similar operations or sales structures to ours?
8. What companies have similar cost structures to ours?
9. What companies employ similar processes to the ones we use?
10. What companies are trying to innovate in similar ways to ours?
11. What companies of our size have similar ownership and/or financial structures?
12. What companies that do the same general things we do have comparable business situations?
13. What other companies that share our general business category are most similar to us?
14. What other companies are facing comparable competitive dynamics?
15. What other companies are facing comparable cost pressures?
16. What industries look / behave like ours? Why/how?
17. What companies look / behave like ours? Why/how?

See, with this strategic thinking exercise, there’s no reason your business has to feel so alone in its innovation challenge. There are definitely innovation case studies you can discover and explore for new ideas. Thank goodness for this additional way to take advantage of a strategic analogy.  – Mike Brown

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