Doer Business Development: Practical Processes for Generating Innovation in Large Companies

Doer Business Development is an approach in which each member of a team individually seeks to materialize their ideas into a business concept in response to a shared theme during the conceptualization phase (see Figure 2) of a new business development project. By avoiding the separation between “thinkers” and “doers” within teams, this approach makes all team members into “doers,” thereby maximizing speed and number of attempts during the conceptualization phase of new business development. In other words, consultations and discussions between team members are, in principle, not conducted. Instead, each team member moves forward with their own independent plans while receiving support from the team leader (see Figure 3).

There are three key principles in Doer Business Development. The first, as stated above, is prioritizing “ideas that motivate the person responsible” over “ideas that are apt to succeed.” Next comes “each individual actively advancing a single idea to the business conceptualization phase,” rather than holding consultations and discussions within the team. There may be times when, as the new business development manager, you may be concerned that an individual team member may not be able to complete business conceptualization for a single idea. Despite this, there are rational advantages to nevertheless delegating this work to a single person that outstrip those concerns.
In interviews with new business development managers at large companies, we almost always hear of the issue of the complexity of approval processes. However, such issues are rooted in the corporate structures of large companies. They are corporate management issues that are not limited to new business and should be tackled by accelerating decision making across the board. What new business development managers should instead really focus on is the time taken up by consultations and deliberations within the team, as well as the waiting time that emerges between meetings. More time is spent on internal back and forth before the decision-making stage. This is precisely where the true loss is to be found. Large companies necessarily see the number of team members involved in a new business increase. Because there will be major gaps between team members at the idea seeding stage as they seek to go from idea to business conceptualization, aligning those ideas incurs massive communication costs.

What is lost is not only time. Ideas can also lose their edge or their innovativeness as a result of taking on too many opinions from a variety of different angles. Furthermore, while repeatedly aligning opinions and making compromises, this process often risks the enthusiasm that team members feel for their business idea gradually weakening, and their motivation declining. Doer business development keeps this sort of internal back and forth to a minimum, preventing the loss of the intent of the original idea, or what made it attractive, and making a principle of progressing to business conceptualization in the shortest path possible.
The third principle is “getting the idea out, rather than refining it,” thus, to that end, proactively completing ideas. Ideas need to go through repeated trial and error and approach completion recursively while receiving feedback from leaders and approvers, insofar as the person responsible for the idea can maintain motivation. There are many examples, however, of ideas getting cut off at the conceptualization stage in doer business development. But we do not view that as a problem. To generate new ideas and try them out, it is important to finish with existing ideas at the appropriate time. By minimizing the sunk costs of bringing an idea to the conceptualization stage, doer business development achieves its true aim of establishing a high-turnover idea cycle.

The doer business development process is divided into five steps: Team formation, theme setting, idea generation, business conceptualization and deciding whether to implement a PoC.

In the team formation step, a team is formed with multiple members under one leader. Each member in the team will work on planning different business ideas based on a shared theme. In the theme setting step, the assumptions required for new business development are summarized in a project brief (see Figure 8 (1)) containing the project’s background, aims, expected budget, general schedule, approval flow and limitations. All team members are given a shared understanding of this, framed as the business development theme. If there is misalignment in the team over how team members understand their targets, the direction of business conceptualization will get muddied, and progress to the original aims will not be made, no matter how much trial and error is practiced. For this reason, a shared understanding of targets is especially important in doer business development, as it has relatively more individual work than other processes. Leaders need to hold careful, repeated dialogues with all team members until they are confident that everyone is on the same page.
Once the team leader determines that a shared understanding of the theme has been achieved, the process moves on to the idea generation step. In this step, each member brings at least three business conceptualization sheets (see Figure 8 (2)), then all team members discuss them. The business conceptualization sheet needs to be made to the level of detail where it can convey in specifics to other team members an overview of the business, up to the point of including an outline of the profit the business will generate for the company, the value it will offer to customers, the anticipated business scheme, the status of any similar businesses, the potential revenue scale or growth potential, and a marketing strategy for bringing the business to market.* An approach in which teams probe into simple ideas one by one after the fact generates repeated reconsiderations and, as a result, significantly damages team efficiency. Based on these business conceptualization sheets, the ideas are discussed within the team and combined or divided, then, finally, each member picks one of the ideas from among the proposals and becomes responsible for it. If there are team members left who cannot pick out an idea they are happy with, those team members are brought together to repeat the idea discussion step. While doer business development is centered on individual-led activity, we recommend having everyone involved in discussions in the idea generation step. This is because coming into contact with the ideas and perspectives of others will serve as an opportunity for broadening the thinking of team members. Because discussions are carried out in delineated blocks of time, there is also no concern that time will be wasted by the process.
Next, once each team member has chosen an idea, the process moves on to the business conceptualization step. The goal of this step is to gather the information needed to make a decision about moving on to the testing phase, to surface the benefits, costs and risks of the chosen idea, and to summarize all this as a business plan (see Figure 8 (3)). While it is fine for the details such as market receptiveness that should be tested by a PoC to be based on hypotheticals, as with the concept and MVP development costs, items that are outside the scope of PoC testing should be clarified as much as possible in advance, and information about them should be arranged to a level that allows approvers to make decisions about whether or not to go ahead. For that reason, it is desirable to organize what information can be ascertained in advance and what information should be clarified through a PoC, and to clearly separate out the two. In this step, leaders need to be constantly abreast of the progress of each team member in producing their business plan, and, as a doer, to supplement areas where team members lack sufficient skills, while carefully understanding the intentions of the team member in question. To thus create a high-turnover idea cycle, leaders promote the quick abandonment of projects that stall out at this stage, and encourage team members to move on and take on other ideas for which they have more enthusiasm. As a rule of thumb, if a project shows no sign of movement for two weeks, leaders should treat this as the point at which they should review whether it is worth continuing.

The final step in doer business development is for the approver to decide whether to allow a PoC to be implemented. Only business plans that the team leader has decided have achieved a sufficient level of quality will be put forward for judgment. A PoC is a process that involves customer contact points, so it means incurring a certain amount of risk in implementation as a company. Because developing an MVP also incurs considerable costs, deciding whether to advance a project to the PoC phase is something companies should think carefully about. What matters in making this decision is the balance between the costs required to test an idea and the returns that can be gained from testing the idea. Costs here are not simply development costs. They also include hidden costs in the form of the risks to trust in the company from coming into contact with customers and the impacts internally and externally from a potential failure. Returns, on the other hand, also refer to more than just project revenue. Returns need to be considered holistically, including indirect benefits like hints and learning impacts gleaned from the process even in the event of failure and value in the form of external appeal. What is required of leaders and approvers here is to avoid decision-making that is dependent on direct market sense in the form of “are we likely to be able to sell this?” Market receptiveness is something that only begins to become clear through a PoC. Teams cannot have confidence about this in advance. Rational evaluations rather than intuitive sense is precisely the most important perspective in making decisions about PoCs.
Business plans that are approved for implementing a PoC move on to the development of an MVP based on the details of the business plan and proceed to the testing phase. At this stage, individual progress becomes largely impractical. For this reason, leaders will assign appropriate people and reconstruct the team structure, thereby moving to a structure that can implement a PoC, test it and operate a cycle of improvement.

*For companies that struggle with the problem of not being able to generate ideas, we encourage you to consider making use of the Ideation Workshop offered by ABeam Consulting.

By practicing doer business development as described above, we believe companies can overcome many of the typical anti-patterns that they are prone to fall into during the conceptualization phase of new business development. At the same time, when implementing such an approach, we can also anticipate that a variety of issues will manifest themselves, including difficulties around forming consensus internally and the ambiguity of decisions to abandon ideas in the high-turnover idea cycle.
ABeam Consulting possesses the knowledge and systems to be able to provide end-to-end support from conceptualization to execution in new business development. We provide multidimensional support for organizational formation aimed at implementing a doer business development approach. In particular, we offer highly effective support through a unique approach to designing processes that allow team members to tackle challenges autonomously, and to setting standards for deciding when to pull back from a project. If this would be of use to your company, we would be delighted to speak to you.