Using opportunities

- [Trainer] The capturing of value can be thought of as a synergistic blending of resources. Usually, value capture starts with an observation of a desirable external trend or resource. There's gold in them they're hills. The capturing of value is realized when a plan is executed to apply owned resources, for example picks and shovels to capture and convert the initially observed trend or resource. Leveraging opportunities are facets of creating, capturing, and converting value. When you discover opportunities through a SWOT analysis, you're identifying valuable trends or external resources that you want to use for growth. The capture and conversion of these trends and resources can be achieved through the application of your own strengths or as a result of improving or eliminating known internal weaknesses. I'd like to share with you an approach to creating plans that leverage opportunities discovered through SWOT analysIs, which you can use to create valuable strategies to drive growth and innovation. An effective way to capture value is to blend external opportunities and internal resources, both strengths and weaknesses by creating problem statements. Specifically, you want to find ways in which you can utilize your own internal resources to capture specific opportunities. Let's imagine for a moment that during a SWOT analysis, you identify an opportunity to capture new sales in an industry that is different from your own. You've also identified that several of your organization's key strengths include a flexible sales team and a low cost of manufacturing. From these inputs, you can create the following two problem statements and related scenarios for consideration. The first question focuses on our sales team, how can our flexible sales team capture new sales in a different industry? If we want to adopt this strategy, we'll need to address a number of related questions including: will our sales team be able to come up to speed on the target industry quickly and with the appropriate depth of customer knowledge? Will they be able to forge new relationships easily? How do we enable them to discuss our value proposition to our prospects in the target industry? The second question focuses on our cost of manufacturing. How can our low cost of manufacturing capture new sales in a different industry? If we adopt this strategy, we'll need to make sure we have as much insight as possible into the state of manufacturing for similar products in the target industry. How does our cost of manufacturing compare to that of the target industry? Are there fewer material or regulatory costs in the target industry? How much does the cost of manufacturing in the target industry affect profit margins? For each pairing of strengths or pairing of improved weaknesses with opportunities, a problem scenario can be created, evaluated and ranked as possible strategies for growth and innovation. Since each opportunity can be hypothetically aligned with each resource, strengths or weakness identified through a SWOT analysis, there are potentially many strategies that can be considered from relatively small lists of identified resources. The strategic mapping of external and internal resources is one of the main benefits of a SWOT analysis that many people miss if they just stop after developing the four lists in a standard SWOT workshop. By creating problem scenarios that align internal assets to capture external value, a SWOT analysis can help define growth and innovation strategies that can transform both individuals and organizations.