New business development

New business development concerns all the activities involved in realizing new business opportunities, including product or service design, business model design, and marketing. When splitting business development into two parts, we have: ‘business’ and ‘development’. The first things that come into mind when looking at business are: economics, finance, managerial activities, competition, prices, marketing, etc. All of these keywords are related to risk and entrepreneurship and clearly indicate the primary scope of the term ‘business development’. Development is very abstract and can be linked with some of the following keywords: technological improvement, cost reduction, general welfare, improved relations, movement in a (positive) direction, etc.

In the traditional definition of Business development, Business Development is mostly seen as growing an enterprise, with a number of techniques. The mentioned techniques differ, but in fact all of them are about traditional marketing. The main question in these issues is: how to find, reach and approach customers and how to make/keep them satisfied, possibly with new products. (Kotler, 2006) Since this definition is limited and lacks some essential factors in business developing, a complete new definition of Business Development will be introduced. Of course, the theory on “traditional” marketing is still correct and can be adopted from the old definition. When supplying a solution, it is important to focus on the total offering you give instead of only focusing on the product or service. An offering is a package consisting of different proportions of physical product, service, advice, delivery and the costs, including price that are involved in using it. Hereby the advice, adaptation to the customer and the costs are the most important factors to get the right combination within the offering. (Ford et al., 2006; Hakansson et al., 2004) Drawing on contingency theory, an idea central to new business development is that different product-market- technology combinations can require different marketing strategies and business models to make them a success (Tidd et al., 2005). To chart the factors that are involved and create synergy between them, new business development draws heavily upon the fields of technology and business networks. The new business development process is to recognize chances and opportunities in a fast changing technological environment. Often uncertainty arises because of new technology and their new markets.