Knowing your Business Context is key to Product Development.
What is business Context?
Business context is the sum total of conditions that exist in the market – the availability/lack of capital, the demand (customer), supply (competition), your own capabilities (people, process, systems & technology), availability of patents, trade secrets or trade marks, brand access, product lifecycle, supply chain for how your product is assembled, sales, marketing & distribution channels, and other external forces like regulations, government policy.
It allows for you to be able to reconfigure your capabilities to affect business model innovation. A simple context diagram like the following goes a long way towards helping you gain consensus among practitioners, stakeholders and customers.
An organization has its own culture. Understanding power structures and organizational context is critical to being able to innovate. You will need budget, capabilities, resources, and buyin to get anything done. Navigating the corporate labyrinth can only be achieved through selling your ideas.
The following is an example of how we changed the game by introducing a product like Therapeutic Resource Centers into a standard utility business like a PBM.
We have created a proprietary framework to help sell your ideas. Here is an example of the framework which I have used in the past to validate our strategy.