The pentagon at the centre of the graphic symbolises the vendor and its current market today. This represents its home, its place of safety. Each vendor has several dimensions of growth opportunity available to it, which we represent by axes on this chart. The further a vendor moves outward along an axis, the further it gets from its comfort zone.
These five axes are intended to be orthogonal, but can only be represented on a chart in two dimensions.
The seven principal categories of strategy, which our competitors are using to grow revenues, form six ‘petals’ and one centre of this ‘flower’:
Struggling vendors tend to be defensive—focussing on their installed base—but industry leaders typically use multiple strategies to expand their scope.
Tomorrow I'll give a few current examples, and try to place them on the chart.
P.S. Prior to writing this blog today, I hadn't got around to suggesting a name for the chart. We just use it without worrying about that. But if we are to use a single, simple analogy to explain the chart, it probably doesn't help to mention 'forays' in one breath and 'petals' in the next. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
It may be that the usefulness of the chart is purely presentational. But it helps management to see, on a single page, the multiple growth strategies that a competitor is employing, and get some sense of the risk arising from exposure to multiple dangers.
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