15 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Prepare for 2014
By
Mike Brown
For those executives still developing next year’s strategies aimed at creating strategic impact in 2014, we’ve opened up the Brainzooming strategic thinking R&D lab to share fifteen newly developed, innovative strategic planning questions.
15 Innovative Strategic Planning Questions to Prepare for 2014
This group of innovative strategic planning questions is heavy on identifying new market, product, and competitive opportunities to challenge your organization in dramatically expanding the benefits you deliver to your customers.
Fostering Innovative, Disruptive Ideas
- What steps do we need to take today to allow somebody (or multiple somebodies) in our organization to test new, disruptive ideas without ANY constraints?
- What steps could we take to better incorporate the creative genius of students still in school to develop new ideas?
- What would happen if we gave someone in the organization the title of “Mad Scientist,” and we left her or him alone to imagine new inventions every day?
Identifying Innovative Strategic Opportunities
- If we are producing a component intended to address another product or service’s gaps, holes, or flaws, are we targeting our component to a product/service of that which will make what we’re creating as valuable as possible?
- How differently would we bring products or services to market if we started our design process with an unchangeable list of benefits AND an incredibly low-price target?
- Where are the “these people need those people, and those people need these people but nobody is connecting the two groups” opportunities our brand could solve?
Creating Competitive Advantage
- What markets can we rapidly move into where we have an underdog’s advantages?
- How can we do something so big and challenging in a new market that current players will have to follow us, thereby bolstering our market development efforts?
- How can we go around any parties standing between our clients and our brand in order to simplify buying for our consumers?
- How can we realize scale of economies in new ways through serving and supplying remote, low-density markets from a high-density location?
Prioritizing Market Strategy Opportunities
- What will it take to dramatically improve the clarity of our marketing message by reducing the number of DIFFERENT messages we blast into the universe?
- In what ways can we make it easier and more rewarding for our broad audience to share their opinions and take buying action on them?
- Within our content marketing, what has to change to address five additional facets of both the human and business dimensions of our audience?
- How do we craft a social media approach that still works hard for us if Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or some other high-profile social network went away next year?
Addressing Professional Development
- What are my personal and professional development dreams, and what roadblocks do I need to eliminate (or simply ignore) to bring them to reality next year?
Mike Brown is the founder of the Brainzooming Group. He has been at the forefront of leading Fortune 500 culture change, contributing new approaches in research, developing simplified tools for innovation, strategy planning, and aligning sales, marketing, and communications strategies for maximum business results. Additionally, he’s won multiple awards for his strategic brand-building approach to customer experiences in NASCAR and conference event marketing efforts.
