Every big company starts small. Let's take a very interesting example, one of the most successful examples in the food service in the last years, Starbucks. Starbucks started with one single bar in the 70s in the U.S. and now it can count on dozens of thousands of stores all over the world. For some companies, it took centuries to become bigger. For some companies, it takes years. For some companies, it's just a number of months. So the point is how to design a growth path. That is to say, how to identify, in the market, some growth opportunities, and to grab this opportunity in order to follow the growth. When I talk to managers and entrepreneurs, the view that I get is that they think they have to follow the growth in the market, but the real point is to identify growth opportunities. That is to say, the market doesn't grow in itself. A market grows because demand and supply interact and those interactions make it grow. So it is important to try to figure out which are the options that a company has when the company wants to design a growth path. To make it easy, we can consider a market as a pie and the position of the company in this market is one slice of that pie. So, having this picture in mind, we can identify three different strategic options. One is to grow within the current market, that is to say, to make that slice bigger. So, one way to do this, and the only way to do this if you assume that the size of the pie stays exactly the same, is to take some part of the market away from your competitors. So, making your slice bigger, means making the slice of your competitors smaller. So, in this case, the growth is against competition. And, so it means, the company has to find a way to make the value proposition more interesting to competitors’ customers or to your customers so that these customers prefer your value proposition to the value proposition of your competitors. One other option is not to consider the size of the pie as a datum. That is to say, to consider that every time a market is in a typical stage of its life cycle, in every time, there is a potential market. That is to say, there is a potential bigger pie out of which a company can get a share. So, the strategy would be not to grow within the current pie, within the current market, but to try to activate a potential market. activating a potential market means, basically, to make a bigger pie and then to get a slice of a bigger pie. One way to figure out how to do this is to consider that basically, the pie is made of volumes, it's not made of heads. So that pie, the current one or the potential one, is made of volumes, concurrent volumes and potential volumes. So how can you increase the volumes of a market to make a bigger pie, to activate a potential market. And one way to figure it out is to consider that volumes is a fruit of a multiplication, the number of consumers times the occasions of usage, times the quantities that each consumer buys in every occasion of usage. So, if you want to increase your volumes or the volumes of the market, you have two different options or a combination of these three, increasing the number of customers, increasing the occasions of usage, increasing the quantities they buy. Each of them are potentially strategies to activate a potential market. So one strategy is to try to convert non-customers into customers. And I'm not talking about customers of the company, I'm talking about customers who have the need and the desire, but do not buy any product within the product category, neither from me, nor from my competitors. So, it basically means that these customers do not find, in the market, any value, proposition, mine or my competitors’ ones, which is able to satisfy their needs. On the other side, we have the occasions of usage, that is to say, customers who are actually buying within the product category, from myself or my competitors, but they don't use the product for a number of occasions of usage. In this case, one way to enact the potential market is to innovate the occasion of usage, to give customers an idea that the value proposition, the product, the service, can also be used in an number of different occasions of usage. And, in this case, there are very nice examples that we're going to show you. The third option is to increase the quantity. So basically, for those customers who actually are buying within the product category, they are using a number of occasions of usage but every time they buy and consume, they consume a quantity which is less than the potential. So in this case, any strategy, any action which is able to increase the quantity consumed by each single customer, is able to increase the overall volume, and so the potential market. The third option is to create a completely new market. That is to say to convert non-customers into customers, but the point is also activating the potential matter we talked about converting non-customers into new customers. What is the difference? That in this case, the third option: creating a completely new market, we have in mind customers who today do not perceive the need or the desire, or the need or the desire is a latent stage, it’s implicit. So, if you talk to them, they don't tell you that they have a need or a desire but usually, this is because they don't think that there is any value proposition able to satisfy their expectations. They don't think that their desires or their needs can be satisfied. The difference is that in strategies, apt to activate a potential market, the focus is on non-customers who perceive the need or the desire but today, they do need satisfy this need or desire. In the other option, creating a completely new market, the focus is on your own customers who don't think, today, they can have their desires or needs satisfied. Each of these strategic options is an option for the company. When a company decides to grow, it has to choose one of these three options. Obviously, it can also choose a combination of the three, but, usually, one of the three is, let's say, effortful enough to focus on the investments and the efforts of the company. One point to make is, obviously, the three are different in terms of risks. If you want to grow within your current market, you can rely on your current competencies and also on the current knowledge that customers have. So, basically, the risk can be a risk of innovation or it can be a financial risk, but you are within the same set of competencies shared between you, your competitors, and your customers. The second option, enacting a potential market, is riskier because in this case, you want to change the habits, the perceptions, and the categorization systems of your customers, so the innovation is much stronger than in the innovation you have to pursue when growing within the current market. And, obviously, the third situation is the riskiest, because creating a completely new market means to try to transform non-customers, that is to say, customers who are not thinking today that their desire and needs can be satisfied into customers. It requires an innovation but at the market level and sometimes at the technological level but in any case, at the customer level. And for this reason, the innovation is much stronger, much more sophisticated than the innovation you can use in the two first options.