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• Pankaj Seith
  IIMA, PGP, 1992. Trainer & Adviser, Ex Hindustan Lever, HDFC Group & HT Media

Dear Mithun, Business diversification is a an opportunity as well as a challenge. Hence, you must navigate this carefully and some helpful tips are as below a) Use the “Ansoff Matrix” as a framework for this. You can read about it b) Always do small pilots and learn / refine basis that and only then consider scaling up. Read up about the “FDV framework of innovation” – it will help you greatly c) Learn from the successes of companies in other geographies / sectors. This is also sometimes referred to us R&D 2.0 (=Read & Duplicate). It may sound odd but can give you good ideas. I would encourage you to use good AI tools like Perplexity, Chat GPT etc to do your basic research on the above and then read up more and apply those learnings. Take care

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• Prakash Sheshadri Nathan
  IIMB, PGP, 1993. Leadership coach and Mentor, Multiple leadership positions in privately funded infrastructure business, Climate Investment

Hello Mithun, Business Diversification can typically be thought of as a 2 by 2 matrix. Let us say you are in the business of making pencils and you are marketing these products in South India. One way to diversify is to expand the geography of operations to All India but sticking to pencils. The other way is to think of expanding your product range and say that I would like to be in the business of writing instruments, but stick to South India. The third way is to say that I would like to diversify into writing instruments but operate all over India. Thus when you think of diversification use a two by two matrix kind of thinking of expanding to more geographies or more products (initially related products) and finally do both. Hope this gives you a structured way to think about diversification.