From Digital Mastery to Accelerated Growth
For more than two decades, companies around the world have invested heavily in digital capabilities. They’ve trained their workforces in new skills and transitioned product development to agile, multidisciplinary teams. Software now permeates most offerings, and organizations have adopted a culture of innovation, design thinking, and enterprise-wide digital platforms.
The natural next step is to capitalize on these strategic strengths to drive faster, more dynamic growth. Business building – whether that involves creating, launching, and scaling entirely new ventures or accelerating existing product lines – emerges as a consistently effective pathway to reach those higher growth horizons.
That doesn’t mean merely rolling out additional products, adding a secondary brand, or sticking to adjacent markets. A business-building mindset enables a company to systematically create high-growth opportunities, be it through new go-to-market channels, acquisitions, or independent subsidiaries.
Crucially, this approach does not require sacrificing the stability of the core business. Instead, it seeks fresh growth potential within the organization’s existing assets—helping the company become, in essence, a continuous builder of new businesses. While many efforts fail in practice, digital expertise can significantly improve the odds of success. Leaders can pursue business building confidently if they apply a proven process.
A New Path to Growth: Priorities and Readiness
Recent surveys of hundreds of senior executives worldwide confirm that business building has emerged as a major strategic priority. Among these leaders, more than 70% said they view business building as an essential focus, launching an average of five new growth initiatives each year. Many invest more than a quarter of annual revenue in startup ventures, whether launched in-house, acquired, or co-developed.
Although most respondents call their initiatives successful, only about half feel fully prepared for future launches. They may succeed once but remain unsure they can replicate that success. Issues range from limited alignment on direction and strained funding to talent shortages and poor product-market fit.
By contrast, organizations with repeat achievements in business building have developed ways to recognize these pitfalls early and address them head-on. Their edge often comes from deep preparation, which hinges on leveraging existing strategic resources and ensuring the right leadership support to use them effectively.
Nine Vital Resources for High-Impact Growth
When building new businesses, strategic assets allow an enterprise to break through – especially at launch. Based on practical experience guiding hundreds of growth initiatives, nine core assets repeatedly prove critical:
- Intellectual property (IP)
- Data
- Distribution channels
- A strong brand
- Robust financial position
- Innovation culture
- Strategic partnerships
- Technology
- Talent
One might assume that established enterprises have a natural edge in collecting these resources. However, many leaders say they actually possess only a handful of these nine critical assets, and even fewer deploy them effectively. This alignment gap is a prime reason large companies struggle to build new businesses with consistent success.
Act Quickly to Capture Early Advantage
Another challenge centers on the time required to identify, approve, and launch new ventures. Many survey respondents said:
- Their companies can take up to three years to decide on a new business concept, and another three years to bring it to market.
- Leaders often budget three to four years before expecting profitability.
That patience is commendable in some ways but may cause organizations to miss lucrative windows of opportunity. More than 40% acknowledge they take longer to debut new offerings than startups do. Many also cite examples of competitors beating them to market with solutions they believe they could have developed first.
Insufficient preparation often lies at the root of such sluggishness, leading to hesitation and slow progress. Accelerating growth typically requires streamlined governance, stage gates that permit quick iteration with minimal initial investment, and a well-honed ability to gauge and manage risk. Building the right capabilities early pays off in faster, more decisive business-building initiatives.
Three Steps to Strengthen Business-Building Capabilities
For leaders seeking to unlock growth and move beyond one-off successes, it’s critical to invest in underlying capabilities rather than focusing on individual ventures in isolation. Here are three foundational steps:
1. Lay the Groundwork for Repeated Success
Sustained business building hinges on being structurally and culturally ready for repeated, rapid experimentation. Ask tough questions:
- Assets and Competition. Which strategic resources do we truly have at our disposal, and how do they compare to those of our competitors? Large enterprises may lack the agility of startups but can leverage a global distribution footprint or established brand power to accelerate a new venture.
- Organizational Structure. Do our governance systems make room for entrepreneurial ventures? Is leadership genuinely committed to experimentation and risk-taking? Our financial metrics and approval processes may need to shift from standard year-over-year growth assumptions to more dynamic approaches.
- Training and Culture. Do managers and teams have the skills to deploy digital tools, generative AI, or agile methods that speed up product iteration? Consider continuous learning initiatives and realign performance incentives around fostering innovation.
2. Cultivate & Empower Entrepreneurial Talent
A common shortfall in most organizations is the mismatch between available talent and the demands of business building. A new venture needs people who thrive in fluid, high-risk environments – yet big-company structures often push them away or keep them stifled.
Although most leaders say they have the people they need within the organization, they typically fail to offer the freedom or incentive systems that genuine entrepreneurs expect. An environment geared toward venture creation includes:
- Tolerance for exploration: space for testing new ideas and learning from failure.
- Tailored compensation: metrics and rewards aligned with entrepreneurial milestones rather than purely core-business goals.
- Distinct, agile teams: dedicated resources that don’t get bogged down in bureaucratic processes.
- Revised performance evaluation: emphasizing innovation, growth potential, and lessons learned, even if some attempts don’t succeed immediately.
3. Acquire Missing Pieces Strategically
Over 60% of the leaders interviewed said that mergers and acquisitions play a more important role in growth strategy than in past activities.
The success of acquisitions depends on the integration of the people behind the acquired startup, only if the parent company adapts its practices to accommodate new ideas rather than forcing the new team to comply with best practices.
At the same time, buying a venture isn’t automatically the best option. Costs can be high, and the fit might not be precise. Often a strong in-house program, and a clear understanding of how an external business complements existing assets, creates a better platform for deciding when and how to acquire. Balancing internally built initiatives with selective M&A is typically the hallmark of a sophisticated, long-term growth engine.
Balancing Internal Strengths and External Moves
Business building remains one of the most reliable strategies for unlocking transformative growth. Even in financially uncertain times, some of the most powerful enterprises in history have been established. Today, rapid innovation, particularly in AI and the life sciences, adds to that momentum, and emerging market expansions provide new consumer bases willing to try novel solutions.
Seizing these opportunities requires agility, the right partnerships, and a culture that actively nurtures innovative thinking.
By systematically developing the core assets, talent pipelines, and strategic frameworks necessary for rapid, repeated ventures, companies can consistently realize their entrepreneurial potential – and shape their future far beyond the limits of the core business.
