Strategic Business Growth programme
Using the latest thinking and drawing on decades of experience in supporting growth, the Strategic Business Growth programme has been developed to help companies address their specific challenges and develop strategies to take advantage of growth opportunities within their own business context.
What is Strategic Business Growth?
The Strategic Business Growth programme recognises that although growing firms face common challenges, each is unique and requires a bespoke approach to achieve its full potential.
The programme offers a bespoke approach to support each company to achieve its full potential. It does this by combining deep engagement with academics from Cambridge Judge Business School with consistent coaching provided by seasoned coaching practitioners which together empower management teams to address their own challenges and then articulate and systematically develop an implementable plan for growth.
So the Strategic Business Growth programme is a programme offered by the Entrepreneurship Centre here at Cambridge Judge Business School that started in December 2015. We’re now into the fourth, fifth soon to be year for the programme. And it’s a programme that was originally designed having in mind the needs of the leadership teams, of the CEOs, of the managing directors, but also the associated leadership teams of small and medium sized companies that make it an objective for themselves to grow over the forthcoming years, right?
It’s a programme that aims, one way or another, to open up the black box of growth, the way many people see growth, especially from the practise side, and make it accessible, but at the same time, really connect growth to the fact that the leadership teams have to have a strategic mindset for bringing across this very difficult endeavour.
Growth is difficult by itself. It’s difficult enough to deal with. So being able to offer a support platform that will help the CEOs, the managing directors, and the leadership teams of those companies, to go through the process successfully, really achieves tremendous results for them and creates impact for the broader economic prosperity.
Another great takeaway for many of the companies is the fact that they are able to tailor, really, the programme outcomes to the particular needs and to the particular stage of growth that they’re finding themselves into. So not every organisation or every company that’s going to come on board with this programme is going to be at the same stage of growth, or they’re going to be at the same requirement of what growth will mean for them.
But we will work with them, and we make it an objective for ourselves to work with them, through classroom work, but also the coaching, the additional coaching that happens outside of the classroom, to ensure that they will really derive value for the particular needs, a tailored answer to the growth questions that they have.
So the strategic business growth programme brings three key advantages also from the standpoint of learning. First, the capacity to hear the latest and greatest thought leadership discussions and findings in the area of growth management, right? So educationally, this is a programme that really expands our horizons. Second, from a network standpoint, the companies that participate are able to expand their network, both by the peer discussions and the alumni of the programme that they will get in touch to through the events that are organising. But at the same time, by opening up to the broader Cambridge ecosystem, which is one of the unique ecosystems globally.
The last and potentially more important element there is the fact that they, through the participation in the programme, they’re able to blend not only the academic perspectives that might sound, at some level, interesting tools to apply, and interesting theories to hear about, but also the experiential component of people who have done it, have tried it, have seen it happening in multiple organisations, and now they can come back and see how they can adapt and apply similar rules, similar tools in different circumstances.
So this blend between theory and practise, through academic thought leadership and excellence of implementation, is driving companies to achieve the maximum of their growth journeys.
This process of mixed academic and practical inputs develops each company’s managerial capability by setting clear and attainable goals and provides a fully reusable toolkit for growth that can drive collaborative problem solving and effective progress monitoring.
Learn more about the structure of the programme
Growth is one of the most challenging leadership efforts of any CEO and their executive team! We have created a programme that informs companies on how the strategy should guide their growth decisions and actions, while ensuring they are aligned in their beliefs, approach and eventually actions to realise their desired growth outcomes.
Latest blog posts from the Strategic Business Growth programme
Business Leader Series: Comline
Ishan Kamdar, Managing Director of Comline Auto Parts, shares lessons learned on the Strategic Business Growth programme.
Business Leader Series: Durite
Steven Fobel, Director of Durite, shares how they are putting their strategy into practice in latest blog post.
Business Leader Series: Taylor Rose
Adrian Jaggard, a Solicitor and Founding Director of Taylor Rose Solicitors, offers advice for CEOs looking for growth.
Latest news from the Strategic Business Growth programme
How are small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) tackling new challenges posed by COVID-19 (coronavirus)? A recent Enterprise Tuesday event discussed how to overcome new obstacles to growth for small- and medium-sized businesses. The talk was chaired by Professor Stelios Kavadias, Academic Director of the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School, which organises the Enterprise Tuesday lecture and networking events. Guest panellists were Peter Grainger, co-founder of CafePod Coffee; Arash Farboud, Founder and CEO of Arash Motor Company, Arash Technologies and medical equipment firm Unisurge, and Anna Dawson, Energy Product Strategy at satellite data analytics firm Terrabotics. Each company’s leadership team participated in the Strategic Business Growth Programme (formerly known as SME Growth Challenge) at the Entrepreneurship Centre. Common challenges faced by SMEs looking to scale up prior to the pandemic included lack of sufficient funding, an inability to deliver products or services in larger quantities through current operations, and limited access to capable people who can support growth. The impact of COVID-19 on the economy now adds arguably the largest current roadblock to growth. The Enterprise Tuesday panellists discussed a variety of issues related to SME growth and the pandemic, and here are some edited excerpts: Be resilient and…
Healx, a biotech firm that was supported by the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School, says it is using its artificial intelligence (AI) platform to develop drug combinations from approved drugs to seek treatments for COVID-19. The Cambridge-based company, which specialises in rare diseases, said combination therapy candidates will be available in May for testing in collaboration with partners. Healx said that the focus on combination therapies, where two or more drugs simultaneously target different aspects of the disease pathology, has the potential to ensure a more effective treatment. Combination therapies are particularly difficult to discover, as it requires detailed analysis of millions of possible pairs from the thousands of drugs on the market. The Healx AI platform, Healnet, analyses biomedical data from multiple sources to predict those combination therapies most likely to succeed. Healx was previously on the Accelerate Cambridge and the Strategic Business Growth (formerly SME Growth Challenge) programmes at the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge. "The recent spread of COVID-19 is risking the lives of millions of rare disease patients across the world," said Dr David Brown, Healx Chairman and co-founder. "Healx's data-driven AI platform is able to predict, within weeks, which known drugs can be…
The Strategic Business Growth programme from the Cambridge Judge Entrepreneurship Centre recognises the challenges that businesses face when scaling up. We are recruiting the next cohort for February 2020. It is designed to support those companies that are determined to find growth drivers to overcome such challenges. Since its launch in December 2015, 36 firms have successfully redesigned their growth strategy to scale-up. The programme has supported companies across a variety of industry sectors; from construction, retail, healthcare, to precision agriculture. Prominent companies include Healx, who recently raised $56 million. Dr Tim Guilliams, previous participant and CEO of Healx said, "Brilliant hands on programme to help you take a step back and think strategically about growth." Delivered in three two-day modules over the course of four months, the next cohort will commence in February 2020. The module format allows companies to build their management capabilities and establish a network of contacts for both business and personal development purposes. Strategic Business Growth is not only for the CEO or founder of the company, but for its leadership team to enable them to bond and commit to the growth strategy. The modules provide access to the latest management thinking to facilitate the…
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