LT Cani
Businesses are growing selectively across industries and destinations despite most companies addressing the customer needs amidst the rising complexities of competition in the market. Darwinism can be well explained in the global business scenario as multinational companies are exploring remote markets while the hatched niche markets are seeking a way out to wider congregations. In this business dynamics, success is not guaranteed to the companies irrespective of their size, resources, and power. Reviewing several attributes of business today, a few questions often arise like why businesses fail, and, does design matter. SMART (strategic, measurable, accessible, responsive, and trustworthy), connected business designs raise a broad set of new strategic choices converging the attributes of markets, social responsiveness, and customer values to help companies perform as a corporate citizen. Creating social and customer values and securing competitive advantage by acquiring new capabilities to reshape industries have been the growing challenges for companies in emerging markets.
In large organizations, design perspectives are becoming central to the process of business modeling and strategy implementation. The concept of business design has emerged over time as a collective approach in an organization involving customers, stakeholders, and key functional partners. Most organizations have realized today that staying in business as learning organizations helps them grow competitively and consistently in the marketplace. Such business maxim has been described as “systems thinking” that leads to the design principle in business, known as “design thinking.” Companies pursue this concept as a response to the mounting complexities in business operations.
Consumers exhibit positive behavior for products and services that ensure social pricing. Social interactions often motivate a sustainable and social consumption of products. The interplay of consumers within the social (inter-personal) and digital (remote response) platforms also helps companies go social and stay distinctive in the competitive marketplace. Consumers today are increasingly looking for brands that have a social purpose above functional benefit. As a result, most companies are taking social stands in highly visible ways. An effective, convergent business strategy creates social and customer values by coevolving the brand in the society. The connecting thread between society and business consists in developing cognitive ergonomics among the stakeholders and stimulating co-creation of business design.
Value is often measured in either economic or social terms. The blended-value proposition emphasizes that true value, which is a blend of economic, social, and environmental components, is indivisible. After the success of networking practices of business activities with social media over decades, profit-seeking firms have laid explicit emphasis on the creation of social value. This business philosophy has grown in nonprofit organizations as well. Social value is dynamic, and customer-centric companies continuously monitor the perpetual changes in social values, culture, and ethnicity. Consequently, companies have developed social corporate entrepreneurship, which intends to create social as well as financial value.
The social and value-oriented business designs tend to reconceive products and markets based on the social needs redefine productivity in the value chain and build social innovation clusters at their business hubs. Social collaborations focus on improving both business processes and performance. Social orientation of a business starts from a niche, links corporate-interest to shared interest, encourages productive competition, co-creates values, and builds trust among customers.
