Author archive
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We’ve recently completed the design of an interactive prototype of the Going Global service. We would love to take some UK firms through the current incarnation and get some initial feedback. If you’re interested in taking a look at the designs and can come and visit us in London next week, please let me know (mike at madebymany.co.uk).
Regards,
Mike.
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Here are a few sketch designs we’ve been working on for the service.
First up, here’s what we are calling the Country Dashboard view. Essentially, you would be able to select a country to view statistics. Stats from doingbusiness.org such as Ease of Doing Business, Risk, Cost of Entry etc are visualised and presented alongside top-level info from UKTI such as opportunity industries, a map of the area or region, a brief description and an indication of some of the activity that is happening on the site relating to this area.
This view relates to a country, such as Turkey but this template may also be used to represent a region or a city.
We think this view is going to really help firms understand which countries are right for them.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
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Here’s one of the diagrams we’ve been using to convey how our system works. You can download the PDF or click the image below to bring it up in a new window.
There are three main parts.
Search model
We figure that anyone searching for information about internationalising their business is going to be looking for 1 or more of the following types of information:
- Geographical location – i.e. Spain, London or EMEA
- Industry – this might be the user’s own industry (horizontal) or it may be the industry they are looking to serve (vertical)
- Subject – this might be something very general like taxation or something more granular such as VAT
We believe that many people will be looking for very specific bits of information but may also be making quite broad searches. We hope the service will provide information and classification at all these levels.
Participants
There are lots of different types of people who might use this service, and each type of person is going to be looking for different value from the service.
It’s important to ensure that the value is reciprocal and balanced. Service providers need to believe they are going to get some business by helping people on the service, UKTI need to have an understanding of how the value they add is measured, and UK SMEs want to get the information they need at the right time.
The guide
The guide is made up of goals. These are in turn made up of sets of prompts which are categorised by subject. The guide doesn’t give you answers or advice, it merely prompts you to think about the right kind of thing at the right time. Of course, some people won’t want to use a guide, and that’s fine. But some people like the idea of ticking off the things they need to think of.
This really encapsulates a lot of the thinking on this project, so if you have any thoughts or feedback, we’d love to hear them.
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For the last two months we have been working towards a presentation to the UK Technology Strategy Implementation Board (SIB).
The board is comprised of senior representatives of large technology companies such as IBM, ARM, COLT, Logica, Microsoft, 02 and Nokia. In essence, the board’s primary role is to market the UK technology industry to the world. You can read more about the strategy here and the board members here.
The purpose of the presentation was to convey the vision we’ve been working on for the last two months.
The presentation was yesterday at IBM’s offices on the South Bank.
We dressed the entrance with a few visuals to help explain the thinking that went in to the service. Below you can see the example market guide content and the underlying data model for a few of the user journeys we did. I’ll blog a bit more about these two things very soon.
And here you can see the service ecology diagram, which outlines many of the different types of service you may come across when carrying out business overseas. What’s presented here is really just a fraction of the services available. Again, I’ll blog about this bit very soon.
The presentation centered around two user journeys we put together to demonstrate the concept (again, more on this later). We’re big believers in storytelling and user journeys are a great way to convey how a business might benefit from using the service.
The concepts we’ve put together were incredibly well received and there was unanimous support for what we are doing. Consequentially, the board made the decision to continue in this respect.
Of course we are very pleased with the outcome, but we have a long way to go before the work we’re doing starts having a positive impact on the UK economy.
Many thanks for all the people who came in for interviews, commented on this blog and the LinkedIn group. Please do keep giving us your feedback and insight. The success of this project relies on SMEs that are prepared to take the time out to help each other to benefit the UK economy.
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When I began on this project, I knew very little about internationalisation. It’s a huge and very daunting subject. This is because it can be different for every industry, market, product, founder, entry mode etc.
Any complex subject usually has a wealth of academic literature associated with it. And internationalisation is no exception.
From the beginning, we needed some form of robust model to understand the process that firms go through.
Early models of internationalisation, namely the Upsala model and Cavusgil’s I-model, suggested that firms gradually increase their involvement in overseas markets which they consider have some form of psychic proximity to their own domestic market. For example, many firms may consider the US to have a close proximity simply because we share the same language.
The following image conveys the I-model process of internationalisation (Cavusgil).
- Domestic marketing – Firm isn’t considering internationalisation and is carrying out marketing efforts solely in the domestic market
- Pre-export – Firm is researching and preparing for involvement in a new overseas market.
- Experimental involvement – Firm may be attending trade shows, missions, offering services in a new market in order to evaluate demand.
- Active involvement – Firm is trading directly in or with a new market. Typically less than 10% of revenue will come from this new market.
- Committed involvement – Firm has made a commitment to the new market and may be considering other new markets.
The crux of this model is the precis that firms experiment gradually into new markets, as opposed to jumping straight in head first.
However, this model has a number of problems.
The traditional staged models don’t account for the behaviour of some firms (e.g. ‘born globals’) who have the management expertise, a network of valuable contacts, a knowledge-based product (i.e. no physical shipping) and a desire to internationalise to many markets concurrently and rapidly to gain a first-mover advantage.
Born global firms becoming more and more common and is particularly important for UK Technology companies, where intellectual property and technology design form an integral aspect what the UK excels at.
The staged model is still very valid for some firms and we have witnessed a number of firms working in this manner in our own research. However, a more holistic model has been developed by Jim Bell, Ron McNaughton, Stephen Young and Dave Crick.
An integrative model of small firm internationalisation
The integrative model (Bell et al) takes into account not only the more proactive and competitive approach of born globals but includes the more traditional staged approach and even seeks to marry the two approaches with the concept of born-again global firms.
The model indicates the most stereotypical trajectories as opposed to rigid pathways and has served as inspiration for an approach to the design which prioritises versatility.
Most importantly, when incorporating the stages of internationalisation, the model tends to use them more as states, not stages. This thereby affords the potential for forward, backward or repetitive involvement in the ’stages’.
A flexible model, but does it suit you?
I would be interested to hear if you have internationalised your business and you feel you do not fit into the above model.
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In designing the service, we’ve tried to take into account not only our users’ needs but how businesses are currently served. And ultimately, how our service should be best positioned.
We began by working out what big goals SMEs tend to have when looking to enter new markets. These were mostly gleaned through conversations directly with UK SMEs that came into the office, through the LinkedIn group and through other desktop research. They are by no means exhaustive but they certainly cover plenty of ground.
We then started to look at how these goals could be grouped in terms of how current services answer those needs.
As you can see below, these categories are Insight, Planning and Connections.
Insight is all about knowledge and understanding.
Planning is about ensuring things happen on time and on budget.
Connections is about having the right relationships in place.
These aspects are all hugely important depending on the context, but we believe that a service isn’t likely to be everything to everyone. And why should it? Some of these needs are already served very well elsewhere.
We believe the service could do varying degrees of two of these things very well.
Perhaps one day it could do all three, but it doesn’t necessarily need to do all three.
What’s crucial is that it must address the needs that are least best served currently.
Lots of services in the digital world offer these things already, so we plotted where we think those services exist.
We also looked at various services that exist in the real world.
From this, we believe that there is an opportunity somewhere sharply positioned around insight but less on planning. A couple of reasons for this are as follows.
- The area of connections is already well served by LinkedIn, Twitter, trade organisations and other services. This stands to reason, as the concept of connections is commonly understood as hugely important in business of any kind.
- Many participants mentioned how fragmented information about internationalisation is.
- Business planning is still largely closed and confidential and isn’t something that necessarily would thrive in the social web (although the concept of open business planning certainly has legs and isn’t currently well served).
It would be possible to do this in a very scientific and quantifiable manner, however, we’ve used this technique more of a thinking tool than a research tool.
As ever, feedback is very much appreciated.
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We’ve come up with lots of ideas for our service. I’ve uploaded all of them here.
If you’re a manager or founder of a UK Technology SME, take a look, and let us know which ones you think should stay and which should go using the ticks and crosses.
If you come up with your own idea, please feel free to add your own.
You’ll need a Google account in order to vote or submit ideas.
As ever, your help is massively appreciated.
UK Technology Global Markets group