Challenge
A family-controlled, privately held corporate group based in Latin America achieved success led largely by one of its portfolio companies, a Tier 1 parts supplier in the automotive sector. However, its leadership wanted to diversify, concerned it was overly reliant on industries facing threats from disruptive forces.
While the group had a history of expansion through acquisitions, its subsidiaries operated independently, inhibiting coordination of business development across the enterprise. Led by a new CEO, it sought to meet ambitious growth goals by repositioning its subsidiaries as industry platforms and better managing their growth efforts.
Discovery
The group enlisted Innosight to help it define three key industry platforms and revise its corporate structure to better lead transformation efforts. The project was structured around a “future-back” framework, which defines a future state for an organization and works backwards to help it set near-term priorities and milestones.
Innosight helped the group analyze its current strategy by understanding historical drivers of success, as well as future trends, ecosystems, and jobs to be done, developing scenarios to shape decisions around potential strategic opportunity areas within proposed industry platforms. The final phase of discovery consisted of developing a path forward, identifying initiatives and a direction for each potential platform, while aligning stakeholders on an roadmap to guide the transformation of the corporate structure.
Impact
The group defined three industry platforms, one led by its automotive subsidiary and focused on the theme of mobility; another anchored on its existing fruit processing business and focused on integrated agribusiness; and a third based on healthcare after a meaningful acquisition opportunity was identified. Using the future-back framework, the group established roadmaps for developing each of these platforms, creating coherence and cohesion for each theme.
The group’s leadership also clarified how to better organize its portfolio, aligning business development at the corporate level and creating potential synergies as platforms pursued their defined strategic opportunity areas. Meanwhile, the automotive subsidiary has continued to thrive, expanding globally, while the corporation itself was named one of the top 100 companies in the country where it is based.