Business Growth Strategies – Diversification Strategy

A very important question coming frequently to the minds of companies’ managers and policy makers is “should I start a new business line beside the current one? If yes, which opportunity would be the right alternative for me?“.

This question raises due to various reasons. Some managers are frustrated of their current market and think that it doesn’t have the potential to bring them success. Others, in contrast, may think about growing their business based on the resources they have gained by their current successful business line.

Mostly managers choose an alternative which they intuitively think is better and after being involved in the business they start to assess its performance. If so, many resources would be wasted due to a probable incorrect choice. Essentially managers need to evaluate precisely their alternatives based on their current business specifications before getting into real actions. Today, business strategy theories help managers to conceptualize their alternatives based on different criteria and pick the right option.

In this course, we review the related theories and give practitioners a comprehensive understanding on how to evaluate their potential growth opportunities in relation to their current business situation. Precise criteria and variables are developed for managers to evaluate their choices on that basis.

This course, based on a real case, is presented by interactions between Shayan (as consultant and researcher) who tries to conceptualize the problem and its related issues and Hamed (as CEO and practitioner) who raises his own issues and challenges in answering correctly the diversification conundrum.

Shayan and Hamed, both having the background of academia, are practically experienced with around two decades of high level management and entrepreneurship in different businesses. Hamed as graduated of Executive MBA is the entrepreneur and CEO of an engineering company and Shayan as graduated of M.S.c in Entrepreneurship acts as business development advisor of various companies.