How to improve your business strategy for sustainable growth and success?

Leveraging expertise and strategic partners 

To embark on a journey towards sustainable growth, it’s essential to leverage the knowledge, expertise, and experience within your organisation.

If there is a gap within the internal capabilities, look to engage with strategic partners that can support your initiatives and impart knowledge while delivering a solution enabling your organisation to build on best practices. Collaboration and external insights can provide the edge needed to stand out in a crowded marketplace. 

Delivering innovative solutions 

Innovation is key to staying ahead. When assessing your solutions, you need to validate whether they are: 

Feasible – Is there a way of delivering a positive outcome via a technical and/or process improvement?

Viable – Does investing time, effort, and money make financial sense?

Desirable—Do we understand the appetite for change across the organisation (users)? The key to these three concentric circles with innovation at the heart is that we keep a user-centred approach. Challenge conventional thinking to deliver outcomes that not only meet but exceed expectations.

Establishing strong foundations 

Success is built on strong foundations. Like an iceberg beneath the surface of any innovative solution, the foundational principles act as a golden thread, ensuring you deliver a marketing-leading experience across your organisation, its services, the employees, and the users.

The foundational principles to consider (but not limited to) are the governance, ethics, information policies, business strategies, skills, and culture within the organisation. These elements should be iterated alongside your development to ensure long-term sustainability and compliance. 

Emphasising sustainability 

Sustainability is not just a buzzword; it’s a necessity. Evaluate the global and ethical impacts of your enhancements, understand the business value vs. environmental impact of delivering a solution for your organisation and your users, and consider the architecture (on your sites and via your providers) and energy required to deliver services.

For instance, training an AI model consumes energy equivalent to powering a household fridge for a day, and processing an image with AI uses the same energy as an LED light on for 250 hours. These considerations are crucial for responsible innovation and can sometimes be neglected. 

Managing reputational impact 

The reputational impact of any AI service, solution, or system is significant due to the data it handles. Mitigate risks through prototypes, pilots, and planned public deployments. This approach helps in identifying potential issues early and addressing them effectively. 

Driving efficiencies 

Efficiency is about more than just cutting costs; it’s about enhancing productivity and client satisfaction. Drawing inspiration from other industries can provide valuable insights. For example, Great Ormond Street Hospital improved information sharing and task management by learning from Formula 1 pit crews, reducing technical errors by 42% and information errors by 49%. 

Problem-solving approach 

Breaking down challenges into manageable increments with clear goals and vision can drive the innovation many of us desire. Utilise a matrix to define problem statements and identify approaches: 

• Desirability: Understand the appetite for change. 

• Feasibility: Enable technology and process improvements. 

• Viability: Meet budgetary expectations. 

Design thinking 

Adopt design thinking to prioritise challenges, unify objectives, and assess multiple approaches. This method allows for early identification of viable solutions, enabling rapid prototyping and validation. 

Case studies

Two examples I call upon when sharing how to rapidly prototype to deliver service outcomes against business strategy and drive sustainability growth are:

Example 1:

Working with a charity organisation to take the first step on their AI journey

The problem statement broke down into:

Improve, streamline, and deliver an accessible UX (user experience) for donors and operational users, providing an informed and intelligent platform for all users.

We broke down the requirements into 3 requirements:

1. Provide a richer UX for users calling on multiple resources.
2. Broad topics result – pulling and refining results from multiple sources.
3. Real-time results – bring together event calendars/schedules.

We worked with the charity on a rapid PoC utilising Microsoft Co-Pilot to provide a centralised charity dashboard, delivering a rich and clean UX, providing accurate and intelligent results fast, pulling from multiple information sources.

Example 2:

Working with the Environment Agency, the Regulators Pioneer Fund, and Microsoft to take that first step of sustainable innovation.

The focus of this PoC was to measure and forecast the environmental impact of industry on water availability and the impact on the local ecology. In essence, the EA wanted to understand the impact of changing water levels and temperatures on the water network when utilised by industry.

Utilising digital twin technology, the EA uses environmental and industrial data to assess the cumulative impacts of low-carbon technologies, focusing on water availability and temperature using climate projections.

In both examples, prototyping faster to rapidly validate and course-correct a viable solution sustainably drove innovation and business growth, providing the users and the organisations with viable and feasible benefits.

Final thoughts

To enhance your business strategies and drive sustainable growth, an advisory team may be engaged either in a pre-sales or consulting capacity as part of a project. By following the principles mentioned throughout this article, organisations can navigate the complexities of modern business environments and achieve sustainable growth.

Each engagement is tailored to the customer’s needs and will allow you to leverage expertise and strategic partnerships to drive value. If you are looking for a strategic partner to advise on your transformation roadmap, contact our experts and explore our many propositions, varying from Microsoft Catalyst, AI Playbook, Design Sprints, or User-Centred Design Workshops.

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