The B2B / B2G technology company must combine technical excellence, competitiveness and adaptation to current expectations and future market and customer developments.
This triangle of constraints is not easy to balance:
- Technical excellence enables innovation and staying ahead of competitors but if misunderstood it will lead to technical arrogance, over-specification or products without markets.
- The effort to be competitive is essential to control costs and balance them with the value offered, but if it is not understood as an effort on costs alone, it will lead (except in the specific case of a pure price market) to dead ends or to being left behind by competitors in terms of value offered.
- Adapting to the market and listening to customers are also essential, but too much of them will sterilise innovation.
How best to balance this triple requirement?
Balancing technology, competitiveness and market adaptation
Constructive dialogue between technology and market/customers
First of all, by ensuring that there is a permanent dialogue between innovation, technical development and listening to the market/customers: this requires both an organised system of information feedback from the market/customers and the organisation of the technical-marketing dialogue (if we describe it in this way) because this is neither natural nor spontaneous. It may even spontaneously turn into a struggle for influence or a conflict because of the different convictions and “mental wiring”.
Moreover, arbitration between these two spheres of the company must be organised when they defend opposing points of view and convince that the decision is the best one collectively. Who has the power to arbitrate and what is the process of adherence to the decision?
Constant concern for competitiveness
Secondly, by making the issue of competitiveness an early and constant concern in this dialogue and maintaining it over time.
Competitiveness must be clearly conceived not just as a question of costs but as a question of cost-value balance, which of course implies that the understanding of customer value is correct.
It is strange, moreover, in the comments of the public authorities and the media to see to what extent competitiveness is seen most often only from the angle of costs and cost reductions, whereas the simple observation of profitable leaders in many markets shows that these leaders very frequently practise high prices made possible by an excellent understanding of customer value, i.e. of what customers are prepared to pay, whether for product performance or services.
This concern for competitiveness must be taken into account, in the form of a “target price” in relation to a given value, from the first evaluation of an idea, at the time of technical development and product launch, and throughout the life of the product with its updates and upgrades. For products already on the market, this will take the form of a periodic assessment of competitiveness, generally on an annual basis when it is a question of keeping up to date, supplemented by more in-depth special actions when a very significant competitive handicap needs to be overcome.
