Edge Strategy®
Edge Strategy®: A New Mindset for Profitable Growth
Stay focused. Stick to your knitting. In today’s volatile economic environment, filled with uncertainty and sudden change, the forces pushing us to keep focused on the core business are extremely powerful. Of course, profiting from the core is crucial – but the danger is, over-focus on the core can blind companies. Scanning the horizon for new markets and new products can also be tempting, but is risky. Focusing too much on either strategy can cause us to miss the substantial opportunities for growth that are often hidden in plain sight, at the edge of the core business.
How can you identify these sources of growth more quickly and clearly, and get the most value from them? Edge Strategy® articulates a mindset that helps leaders recognize and capitalize on these opportunities.
The Edge Strategy framework challenges how the boundaries of your existing products and services map to your customers’ views of the world. It provides three different lenses through which value can be seen and leveraged:
- Product edge. How to capture incremental profits and other benefits by slightly altering the elements and composition of a core offering.
- Journey edge. How to create and capture extra value by adjusting your role in supporting the customer’s journey to and through your offering.
- Enterprise edge. How to unlock additional value from resources and capabilities that support your core offering by applying them in a different context, for a different offering or different set of customers.
Edge Strategy enables leaders to identify and assess each of the different “edges” and then apply strategic and tactical solutions in specific business contexts. The framework includes a ten-step process that executives and managers can use to find and leverage the edges in their own companies.
Edge Strategy provides a path to growth by getting more yield from assets already in place, relationships already established, investments already made.
Examples of our work
- Helped a leading automotive company generate more than $100 million in incremental profit through introducing and optimizing numerous ancillary service offerings (e.g., insurance, upgrades, etc.)
- Used Edge Strategy framework to help a major global insurance company identify acquisition targets with significant synergy potential
- Spearheaded the innovation behind a major airline’s transformative initiative to offer customers extra leg room while in flight, generating more than $75 million per year in incremental profit
- Helped a major consumer electronics retailer in the U.S. develop a series of new service offering to provide customers with optional installation and technical support services, thereby building a large, highly profitable business-within-the-business
- Worked with a leading telecoms provider to optimize its offering of value-added services and associated product bundling strategy
- Assisted a top hotel chain in unlocking edge opportunities to generate significant incremental revenue, improve customer satisfaction and reposition their brand
Edge Strategy® is a registered trademark of L.E.K. Consulting LLC
