Building new businesses around sustainable products and services

As a majority of businesses transition to their sustainable future, they need to transition into new products/services or completely new market areas (from the energy transition to automotive and building out circular businesses, moving away from todays mainly linear approaches). Determining which markets to enter (potentially as they form), when to enter these markets (from market maturity to inflection points in the companies own portfolio) and how (from business redesign to building the capabilities needed) will be one of the main channels that organisations need to face as the move through the just transition.

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Tools provided: New product development

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Developing entirely new products and services (effectively new areas of business) to take to market draws on a variety of skills - many of which may be relatively new to organisations. It starts with determining how sustainability driven solutions are developing and when markets are maturing - and potentially when the companies existing products and services may need to be phased out to meet emerging sustainability requirements.

 

It then goes through creating products with sustainability at the core - moving from linear production to circular and then redefining how the products are formulated/made, while understanding how emerging supply bases, operational capabilities and technology support are developing.

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It then moves into building out the new business model. This may be redesigning existing production approaches (e.g. moving from Internal Combustion Engined cars to Electric vehicles) or the creation of entirely new products or even potentially divisions/companies (e.g. corporate venturing).

 

Understanding how to develop those solution from incubation of the idea to delivery is the next stage. In this area we will leverage existing approaches in the business for product/ service formulation, building in the sustainability elements to the approach.

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Finally we work with organisations on their launch approach - how to stage into the market, promotion and pricing approach, performance management/iterating the product and sales approach, etc.

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An element we consider throughout the process is the 'build vs. buy vs. borrow' approach - when to build elements internally, capabilities/organisations that we might want to buy (and then how to integrate them) and who to partner with - from materials through to commercial partnerships.

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See an outline of the approach we take below: