Megatrend-driven future business opportunities for an Indian conglomerate
BACKGROUND
In today’s dynamic world where consumer’s preferences evolve rapidly, how can businesses adapt and prepare for the future? This question multiplies in importance when we talk about a conglomerate with diversified interests across metals, infrastructure, fashion and finance. Prior to our engagement, the client had conducted customer/consumer-driven trend forecasts over a 10 year time horizon, impacting existing businesses and identifying immediate opportunities.
PROJECT BRIEF
Turian Labs was asked to identify emerging trends and align them into tangible directions for different businesses to act on.
Identifying & acting on these trends can unlock tremendous value to the group
Creating a framework to assess, evaluate and action upon trends on an ongoing basis can lead to sustainable agility for the business
TURIAN LABS’ Approach
At Turian Labs, we believe that comprehensive innovation in the VUCA scenario requires thinking through user needs, projecting future scenarios and applying the brand lens. With this approach in mind, we started with a macro understanding of the various businesses within the conglomerate and their journeys towards a ten year horizon.
Our nest step was mapping the trends, directions and opportunities aggregated by the client through their internal studies, complemented along by our study of megatrends. We created a framework, including:
Macro-trends: an amalgamation of the client’s work & our body of megatrends
Sub-trends: opportunities emerging across domains/industries
Evidences: tangible examples of the outlined opportunities such as policy directions, R&D, business cases, etc.
Futures Thinking in action
With this framework in place, we used it to generate actionable insights which different businesses could leverage as part of their future-planning exercise.
We also conducted Futures Thinking workshops with the objective of familiarizing teams to Megatrends and how to translate them into actionable opportunities.
The first workshop was conducted at the higher conglomerate level, including CXOs (group + businesses) and teams from corporate strategy, innovation team, customer insights and business intelligence.
The second workshop was at a group-level, attended by CXOs & key decision makers across various verticals with the company.
Key DISCOVERIES & CLIENT IMPACT
Workshop outputs included tangible ideas for the group businesses to build upon, in addition to exploring group-level synergies, to generate a solution which leveraged capabilities of the different group companies.
Though most businesses had done long-term planning exercises in the past, the Futures Thinking workshop helped then become familiar with the Megatrends approach. The framework created also helped them contextualize opportunities, and visualize how those opportunities interact with existing initiatives.