Business Consulting 2.0 — The Battleground of Demand, Growth & Protections
Developing successful business strategies requires analyzing data through multiple lenses. Analyzing a multitude of possibilities and their impacts on the business.
The world is missing an essential cog in the wheel of business success. Business consultants are one of the few professionals who have access to confidential data and can analyze it with a degree of precision that conventional science could never achieve. But, even though business consultants have been around longer than other professionals, they’ve only become more popular in the past five years. According to the consulting industry study “The Next Generation of Business Consultants” (TNBC), which surveyed 1,200 businesses last year, consultants are replacing managers as the go-to people for both routine and high-level customer service assignments. This means consulting companies may be seeing a shift in their customer service strategy from serving as a face-piece for their company’s management to being something more like an extension of their business — a role that requires them to dive into new and innovative ways of thinking about customer service.
In the world we live in today, it’s not just about technology and digital transformation. It’s also about business strategy and execution. The big players have moved on from their 20-year-old Digital Transformation Plan to adopt a modern, creative and adaptive business model — with an emphasis on employee benefits as a cornerstone of this transformation.
Conventional Business Consulting
“The conventional business was all about demand & growth”
In recent years, there have been many initiatives that have challenged conventional wisdom in the business consulting sector. These have included the rise of digital transformation and the need for change in the way that companies are run. This has led to an examination of the role of in-house and outsourced consultants. In some cases, this has focused on the integrations between in-house and outsourced consultancies, as well as their relationship with third-party vendors. In other instances, it has contained the need to examine the efficiency of the in-house and outsourced teams, as well as their relationships with third-party vendors. In the business sector, consultants often operate as a team, with the head of the team serving as the “sole” advisor to the board of directors of the company. However, in this modern, competitive world, where firms employ people from all over the world, it can be more accurate to speak of a “club.” Most large corporations now have clubs full of employees, many of whom are highly skilled in many fields. Some of these employees may work in areas such as finance, marketing, or HR. Others may work in areas such as digital transformation, or intelligence analysis. Outsourced consultancies, on the other hand, have the same special status that businesses have long associated with the term “insurance”: they are considered “free.”
Conventional business consulting looks into market data to identify the product/ service demand in the near & far future, consumer preferences, growth possibilities, threats, market liquidity, and market sentiments. The data would be analyzed and various possibilities would be predicted. For each possible outcome, the consult would lay down the path that the product manager needs to follow. The expertise of the consultant lies in predicting the probability of events and then averaging the actions which would be needed irrespective of which event takes place.
Issues with conventional consulting
While the conventional consulting business boomed for years, it started struggling in the last five years. The success of a strategy is not just a play of market data but also includes various other data.
For instance, despite predicting a strong demand for a product there are other hurdles when one considers patent & copyright infringements. Knowing about growth possibilities is a motivation to enter a market. Predicting the sales and identifying the possible sales channels would be good only when one has the freedom to enter a market.
In today’s world, the market is protected by various intellectual properties (copyrights, trademarks, patents, design registrations, etc), and not knowing which aspects of the business are protected can get one in legal trouble. These legal issues can be dealt with in court but the dent they make in the image of a firm stays for a longer time. The companies lose their markets & consumers and also lag in the technological development of their products because their IP teams are struggling to come out of litigation.
A successful consultant fails if they can’t save you from a billion-dollar infringement suit that will not only harm your finances but also sabotage the goodwill your firm has. No one wants to be called a technology thief.
The Role of Intellectual Property
Typically, every business that uses the intellectual property in any significant way will evaluate the suitability of its consultant employees based on the same criteria that apply to employees of all other companies in the company’s industry. Such criteria include the ability to create and deliver quality research, to sell products and services in the relevant industry region, and to deliver products and services that are either unique or closely related to those in the industry.
The consulting which is enabled by Intellectual Property does not limit to conventional market wisdom but deep dives into the future possibilities of various technologies. While conventional consulting would stop at market research, Intellectual property-enabled consulting would consider the expected disruptions in any technology. The consultants would identify the white space where there is a possibility to expand along with the alternate solutions that are practiced by the competitors.
This holistic consulting approach not only provides insights into expected growth opportunities but also provides the safe pathways that the company can adopt without running into litigations, and technology infringements, and also cater to the problems that are faced by the consumers.
When Intellectual Property integrates with market research
The results are astounding when consultants integrate market data with intellectual property. Now the consultants would start from a macro lens to identify the growth possibilities in any technology. Then they would deep dive into the existing IP to identify the areas for expansion. During this analysis, they would identify the possible sub-technologies that are changing. If there are any signs of technology disruption, the consultants can alert the product managers to stop relying on conventional technology and start exploring alternatives.
When the technologies are not going through disruption but are merely improving on the existing developments, the product managers can become more competitive by collaborating with industry experts. The R&D dollars can be spent on effective collaborations and market shares of any product can be increased. At the same time, the white spaces are effectively explored and new IP can be generated to protect these niche developments. In the future, these new IP protections can be used to generate new streams of revenue, and thwart competitors from copying your USPs.
The power of IP-enabled consulting is in predicting the future of technologies and having the freedom to enter markets. At the same time, a smart company can prevent its competitors from launching a certain product feature and can have a monopoly in the market.
Other miscellaneous factors
One of the most significant threats to the future of business consulting is a lack of investment in research. Because of this, it’s important to have a strategy for gathering and analyzing market research. This research should include both internal and external research, and it should identify what research areas the industry is most interested in. It should also include research topics that have a high research value but are not yet approved for publication. Another significant risk to the future of business consulting is a lack of interest by the client in acquiring more expertise. This has been true even during the boom years of the business consulting industry when clients tended to invest heavily in research and education. However, as the business environment changes, many are now looking to sell their businesses as quickly as possible. This means that their expertise will have to move on with their lives. If a company is going to survive in the current environment, it’s important to have the skills and knowledge necessary to serve the business objectives and grow its business.
Conclusion
Business consulting has entered a volatile phase. A lot is being experimented with by consulting companies. The market and growth data is not sufficient anymore and the consultants are exploring other data to predict the future. Intellectual property consulting has always existed as a separate business for R&D teams who would consult with an IP consultant before defining their R&D strategies. As more and more companies are realizing the power of intellectual property, they are asking more integrated questions. To answer these questions, the consultants of the next-gen would be required to use the IP data. There would be no consulting without integrated IP data. The game would be “how the consultant would analyze this new data?”.
