Corporate development involves planning and strategies to achieve a company’s goals, including restructuring management, shifting focus to new markets, and growing through mergers and acquisitions. The process is tailored to each company’s circumstances and can take a long time to implement.
Corporate development is a term that references the variety of planning options and strategies that can help move a company toward its goals. The process of this type of strategic development can be applied to virtually any facet of the corporation’s organizational structure. In actual structure, corporate planning may involve how to adjust the company’s existing structure or expand the company’s interest through acquisitions or mergers.
One of the most common manifestations of corporate development has to do with revamping the management arm of the corporation. This may involve a process of gradually eliminating certain management positions from the existing structure or creating new positions in an effort to strengthen the management team. As part of this type of approach, corporate development may also require that one or more current managers be released from the company and replaced with people who have the necessary skills to move the company forward. When this is the case, the corporate development team will handle recruiting and evaluating potential hires.
Just as a management team can be renewed, corporate development can also be employed to shift customers’ current focus. This could mean looking at the potential for entering new markets with existing products or developing complementary products that will allow for this type of expansion. Depending on the status of the base market, corporate development may also consider moving away from an ever-shrinking consumer market, while seeking market share in a different consumer market with newer products. For example, many typewriter manufacturers during the 1980s and 1990s slowly abandoned their core business and began to focus more on computer parts and accessories as a way to continue operations.
The corporate development process can also be applied to the task of growing the company through mergers and acquisitions. In this scenario, project development will involve identifying potential target companies for acquisitions or syndicates, resulting in a new, more aggressive company. The team will analyze all possible outcomes of any potential merger or acquisition and try to project whether the action is likely to result in positive growth or could harm the company permanently.
There is no tried and true formula for the corporate development process. The actual structure of the corporate strategy will depend very much on the company’s current circumstances and the area in which development is desired. In most cases, the process will not be short-lived; enterprise development is usually a process that takes place over a long period of time and can be tweaked or refined as the project progresses.
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