[AI-Driven New Business Creation] Qualiteg's Original Guide to Framing a New Business Direction and Building Consensus with the Business Owner

Hello, and thank you for visiting the Qualiteg blog. I'm Michele. In my work on AI-driven new business development and marketing, there are questions I hear from clients again and again. Through this blog, I'd like to share my own answers to the challenges that anyone considering an AI-based business is likely to face.

In this post, I will explain how to build consensus in advance with the business owner on the goals a new business should achieve.

Step 1: Clarify the goals and share a common understanding

First, clearly define the vision and objectives of the business and put them in writing. Summarize them on a single page as an executive summary in PowerPoint or a similar tool, and discuss with the business owner the concrete numerical targets (revenue, number of customers, market share, and so on) and how each goal contributes to the success of the business.

The key point in this phase is that the goals will be evaluated on how realistic and achievable they are, so avoid targets that are too ambitious for even you to reach, such as hitting 10 billion yen in revenue in one year.

Based on the MVV (Mission, Vision, Values) analysis you conducted at the outset, explain why your company should pursue this new business — reflecting on and interpreting your company's MVV, and grounding the need for the new business in an understanding of that context.

Next comes a discussion of the criteria by which the decision to commercialize the new business will be made. Clarify the quantitative target-setting described in the previous column, and convey, with concrete figures, that the purpose of undertaking the new business is to achieve those numbers.

In many companies, innovation is spoken of as a principle but fails to translate into actual action. Qualiteg's Innovation-Cross is a co-creation support program that closes this "gap between words and deeds." We thoroughly analyze your company's current state and challenges and formulate a strategy that translates them into concrete actions. Through idea workshops and hackathon planning, we create practical settings for hands-on work and encourage the kind of innovation behavior that is hard to bring about from within the company alone.

Through the practice of open innovation and partner development, your team accumulates experience in creating value through collaboration with outside parties. Experienced consultants work alongside you to reliably realize the flow of transformation from principles to action, and from action to results. We transform innovation from a "culture of talking about it" into a "culture of doing it."

Step 2: Create a roadmap

The next thing you need is a roadmap. Set the major milestones for achieving the agreed goals, such as the development schedule and the marketing strategy.

By setting KPIs (key performance indicators) as the numerical targets for judging whether those milestones have been achieved, you can develop the business without backtracking.

Step 3: Communication and coordination

The final requirement is to explain the communication plan. Set up regular meetings with the business owner to share the status and report on how the plan is progressing.

By setting a communication plan in advance, all stakeholders share the same information, and you are prepared in case changes become necessary — for example, when a competitor announces the release of a similar service. This lets you build a structure for advancing the new business in which the team can respond together.

Getting the business owner to commit in advance on every point can be a high hurdle for the person in charge, but presenting the communication plan and milestones up front also builds trust, which will be a real help in driving the new business forward.

Thank you very much for reading this column to the end. At Qualiteg, we provide training and consulting on AI technology and on methods for planning new businesses. If this has caught your interest, or if you have specific requests, please feel free to reach out via our contact form here.

We also run a well-received workshop for those who want to master the steps of new business creation. The training focuses on having each participant think about the business from an executive's perspective, and the content is designed not only for planning staff but also for their counterparts — engineers, designers, and marketers.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please stay tuned for the next column.