Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs.
Robust methods to identify new growth opportunities are essential for companies aiming to satisfy shareholder demands and drive career success. While many executives discuss ambitious growth plans, few achieve significant results. This hands-on guide reveals how some companies overcome obstacles to achieve explosive growth. The authors introduce "MarketBusters," strategic moves that transform profit streams, disrupt competition, and lead to substantial growth. Drawing on a three-year study, they present forty proven marketbusting moves and five overarching strategies for driving new growth: 1. Change the customer’s total experience to enhance simplicity and benefits. 2. Reconfigure products and services to ensure superiority over competitors. 3. Redefine business practices and key metrics to boost performance. 4. Anticipate or exploit industry shifts to gain a competitive edge. 5. Create a new market space to initiate market emergence. Each strategy is illustrated with real-world examples, including cautionary tales highlighting potential pitfalls. The guide offers action-oriented tools and checklists for identifying opportunities, executing strategies, and maximizing impact. It also provides advice on overcoming implementation challenges and fostering organizational alignment. With new opportunities for explosive growth on the horizon, this resource equips you with a reliable approach to achieving continuous, profitable gr
Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty
The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow's opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete. The authors present simple but powerful ways to stop thinking and acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of a habitual entrepreneur.They show how eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished; create a richly stocked opportunity register to redesign existing products, find new sources of differentiation, resegment existing markets, reconfigure market spaces, and seize the huge upside potential of breakthroughs; build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future while simultaneously leaving the past behind; execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk; and develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization.