The Challenge of Horizon 2: Implications for Effective Opportunity Development

This whitepaper provides guidance on how to successfully implement a governance framework around Horizon 2 (H2) opportunities. H2 focuses on identifying and transforming favorable innovations into viable prototypes through a development infrastructure, with leaders often finding its management complexity challenging. Success in H2 necessitates a commitment to fostering an organizational culture that embraces failure, supports decision satisfaction, facilitates transitions, and encourages cross-functional collaboration.

Key takeaways:

• H2 needs a dedicated governance framework. H2 opportunity development is complex, characterized by conflict and risk due to ongoing learnings and pivots. It requires a dedicated governance framework to successfully manage and transition H2 opportunities.  

• Attune your team to looking for new opportunities.  While new opportunities originate from all horizons, H2 opportunities are unique in that successful identification of market adjacencies using existing resources or innovations can lead to brand extension and diversification of revenue streams.  New opportunities can be identified via unexpected and pre-existing sources such as employees, suppliers, affiliates, and customers. 

• Establish an intrapreneurial culture. Best practices for leaders navigating H2 include a culture that embraces risk taking, cross-functional teams, a forward-thinking mindset, an intrapreneurship approach, and commitment to continuous improvement. 

• Get leadership on board. Leadership buy-in and support are crucial for effective H2 execution. 

Read or listen to the whitepaper.

(If listening to the whitepaper, you can view the figures here.)

If you’d like to go deeper, you can watch the webinar from the authors here.