The SOLVSTUDEO® raison d’être and research product portfolio

In the previous edition of SOLVSTUDEO SENTIMENT, we discussed the different topics and domains of strategy research that is essential in a business environment. We expounded at length on three severe lacunae of prevalent strategic approaches – exclusive participation, episodic nature and overly analytical orientation. Thereby, we arrived at the need of organisations to “involve” its people, “institutionalise” strategic events and “restore” the essence and primacy of key strategic concepts (https://nirsanconnect.com/09/05/2019/solvstudeo-sentiment/marshal-strategy-aspects-of-organisations/). In this edition, we bring strategy research to the vanguard SOLVSTUDEO® – our research category focused on transforming strategy performance of business organisations. We discuss the six research products within the category, and review the synergy benefits provided by the SOLVSTUDEO® platform that accrue over and beyond the benefits from individual products.

The SOLVSTUDEO® platform hosts research products that help businesses drive for insights into strategy aspects of their organisations. These research products encompass the domain areas of business performance management, business planning, risk management, inorganic growth, marketing strategy development and brand strategy development. FORJAHED® researches into the aspects of business performance management; RISACEND® explores improvement opportunities in risk management; STRABYS® identifies gaps in the business planning process; ORBWIN® aims to enhance value creation in M&A situations; BRANSURGE® analyses marketing strategy development processes for product portfolios; GROBRAND℠ enquires into the robustness of the brand strategy development process.

Despite being a core process in the world of enterprise, the management of business performance is often not implemented through approaches that are consistent and well laid out. The existence of an explicit process provides much needed reliability and consistency, casts a wider net for business insight, and instils action orientation. FORJAHED® provides a comprehensive and holistic view of your business performance management process, highlights improvement areas, and identifies causal factors. FORJAHED® believes ‘goal setting’ and ‘performance reviews’ to be the two pillars of business performance management, and disaggregates these constructs into their constituent elements.

While risk is endemic, risk management is often not formalised in the culture and calendar of organisations. Dry financial and analytical exercises that pass for risk management are bound to be futile, since uncertainty lends itself poorly to prediction. RISACEND® adopts an imaginatively resourceful approach to evaluate your organisation’s implicit risk management methods, identify risk domains, and suggest procedural improvements. RISACEND® believes that the more lethal risks often lie beyond cognition. Moreover, the timing and amplitude of uncertain events can rarely be understood without imagination. Finally, solutions for complex multifaceted problems mostly lie in creative domains.

Business planning holds the business together and has implications for a host of processes. STRABYS® observes that the typical business planning process is an iron-clad and one-way static process that is tied directly to budgeting, and designed for dilution when performance lags targets. For planning to guide and aid your business performance, it has to incorporate flexibility and the reaction of competitors. STRABYS® profiles the strengths and weaknesses of your business planning process, examines its interlinkages with surrounding processes, and identifies the need to build scenarios and milestones, with their attendant resource allocation, strategies and interventions.

M&A proposals are replete with proclamations of possible synergies. But what of the humans who will execute against these levers and ultimately generate value? What of the beliefs, attitudes, mindsets, hopes and agency of the peoples of organisations that purport to merge, acquire or be acquired? ORBWIN® outlines the attractiveness and readiness of inorganic activity by focusing on organisation culture and people considerations. ORBWIN® assesses the alignment at a human level of doxastic states such as beliefs, desires and attitudes that are held by people of the two prospective partner organisations, towards the value creation levers that have been proclaimed.

Brands make up the soul of a business enterprise. While marketing literature has emphasised ad nauseam the importance of sharp differentiation, its implementation in real life has been patchy. As scale grows, brand strategy development turns egalitarian and the edge is taken away from the value proposition. For brands to acquire “lighthouse stature”, they need to “unbelong” – from their organisation setting, their portfolio setting, and their competitive setting. GROBRAND℠ examines your brand strategy development process and assesses the level of “differentiation edge and primacy” along six criteria. GROBRAND℠ provides a no-holds-barred assessment of differentiation intensity that your “lighthouse brands” enjoy.

The marketing function is the enabler and direction setter of the commercial engine, and the enterprise’s interpreter of its customers. BRANSURGE® holds that, unfortunately, the function is often confined to controlling marketing expenditures and performing cost-benefit analysis. Missing prominently is the assessment of “portfolio lifecycle” – which is the most defining characteristic of a company’s product assets. BRANSURGE® provides a comprehensive assessment of your brand portfolio; categorises brands based on their roles, goals and strategies; and identifies interventions to strengthen and manage the “portfolio lifecycle”.

Undoubtedly, each of the six products within SOLVSTUDEO® researches for insights while being centred on a unique belief or affirmation that serves as its pedagogic backbone. FORJAHED® champions the significance of “goal setting” and “performance reviews” in business performance management, while RISACEND® embeds the faculty of “imagination” into the risk management process. While STRABYS® engenders the business planning process with flexibility and dynamism, ORBWIN® assesses the doxastic alignment of the peoples of the partnering organisations in an M&A situation. And meanwhile, as GROBRAND℠ causes the brand strategy process to result in brands that “unbelong”, BRANSURGE® stridently upholds the importance of the “portfolio lifecycle” in marketing strategy development.

The SOLVSTUDEO® platform generates synergies over and beyond the impact of individual products on the platform. It does so through interventions in strategies, assumptions and scenarios for all research conducted on the platform. First, the platform ensures congruence across strategies at different levels – company, business, categories, products. Second, it ensures alignment in assumptions and scenarios considered in different strategic initiatives. Finally, it helps in optimally communicating strategies across the organisation.

In the next edition of SOLVSTUDEO SENTIMENT, we begin our journey to understand individual research products on the platform. We start by exploring the domain of “risk management”, examining traditional and implicit approaches, and studying RISACEND® to comprehend possible roles of the faculty of “imagination” in this process.