Ideas for someone else's business
Discussion
Imagine for a moment you work in one business (in my case large scale computing - everything from online banking to analysing terrabyte-a-day datasets) and you look at another business (Lotus cars) and think, "They're missing an opportunity there". You could apply all that you've learned from your industry to the way they're interacting with their customers, owners and fans. It could be transformative, both to the ownership experience and the business that drives it.
From my perspective, this is bread and butter stuff. Taking disparate systems and bringing them together into a coherent whole that tells a strong story is the core of my job. However, when it diffuses down into other businesses they tend to miss the underlying principles and implement piecemeal systems - a customer database here and a funky web gadget there.
So, there's an opportunity for perhaps industry leading change. They could deliver a much more sophisticated service to their customers and also benefit from improved feedback during the entire lifecycle of their vehicles.
It's a schizophrenic situation though. On the one hand I feel I could take the Mary Portas role, pointing out the bleeding obvious (to me) to an client who has a set of business skills that don't necessarily completely overlap with my area of expertise. On the other hand my understanding of their industry is limited to the ownership experience and reading between the lines of press releases. There's the danger of being the sort of nutter that stands up in Dragon's Den and launches into some mad scheme to produce cars with cabbage flavoured paint. OK, that's quite enough television references, but you get the idea.
Now for the questions. Is there any way to make use of an insight like this? The observant will understand that my role is typically one of implementation, rather than the business of selling transformative systems. I also guess that usually companies have to be in the mood to seek change on such a large scale rather than having changes proposed to them 'cold'. My assumption is that it's one of those good ideas that will have to sit on the shelf until someone with the will and authority to implement it does it a few years down the line and I can mutter in the pub "I thought of that first". Or is there a way to consult without already being part of an industry and an established guru?
From my perspective, this is bread and butter stuff. Taking disparate systems and bringing them together into a coherent whole that tells a strong story is the core of my job. However, when it diffuses down into other businesses they tend to miss the underlying principles and implement piecemeal systems - a customer database here and a funky web gadget there.
So, there's an opportunity for perhaps industry leading change. They could deliver a much more sophisticated service to their customers and also benefit from improved feedback during the entire lifecycle of their vehicles.
It's a schizophrenic situation though. On the one hand I feel I could take the Mary Portas role, pointing out the bleeding obvious (to me) to an client who has a set of business skills that don't necessarily completely overlap with my area of expertise. On the other hand my understanding of their industry is limited to the ownership experience and reading between the lines of press releases. There's the danger of being the sort of nutter that stands up in Dragon's Den and launches into some mad scheme to produce cars with cabbage flavoured paint. OK, that's quite enough television references, but you get the idea.
Now for the questions. Is there any way to make use of an insight like this? The observant will understand that my role is typically one of implementation, rather than the business of selling transformative systems. I also guess that usually companies have to be in the mood to seek change on such a large scale rather than having changes proposed to them 'cold'. My assumption is that it's one of those good ideas that will have to sit on the shelf until someone with the will and authority to implement it does it a few years down the line and I can mutter in the pub "I thought of that first". Or is there a way to consult without already being part of an industry and an established guru?
PetrolTed said:
It's rather easy to see solutions for other people's businesses... 
It's equally easy to run a business "the way it's always been run", particularly when advances are being made in industries that you rely on but aren't part of your core competency. Nokia has been royally stuffed in the smartphone business, Borders was brought down by Amazon and so on.Even when companies do innovate, they usually stick to improving their existing practises rather than approaching them fresh. Online banking was pretty much limited to getting your balance until we came along and delivered banking services that could be run without any physical high street presence at all. It spawned an entire market sector and left a few banks dragging behind for quite a while.
Edited by Tuna on Thursday 15th July 14:08
The way I would approach it would be to get a couple of examples of what you could do for them and approach the decision maker in the company (or companies) you think it would work for, show them your work and see if they are interested in exploring further.
You're right that they may simply not have the appetite for it, or the resources to devote to it at present, but make the contact and develop the relationship.
You're right that they may simply not have the appetite for it, or the resources to devote to it at present, but make the contact and develop the relationship.
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