Key Takeaways Key Points • Strategic growth platforms are long-term initiatives for high-scale revenue increases. Generic examples of commonly selected strategic-growth platforms include pursuing specific and new product areas or entering new distribution channels. Chess Opening Book Pgn. • Diversification is a form of corporate strategy that seeks to increase profitability through greater sales volume obtained from new products or new markets.

• Market development strategy entails expanding the current incumbent market through new users or new uses. • Market penetration occurs when a company penetrates a market in which current products already exist, enabling the business to compete head to head with incumbents in the market. • New product development (NPD) is the internal process of bringing a new product to market. • Integration, either horizontal or vertical, is a merger or acquisition process of entering new, related industries (for example, acquiring a supplier or a competitor in a related industry). Key Terms • diversification: A corporate strategy in which a company acquires or establishes a business other than that of its current product. • horizontal integration: The merger or acquisition of new business operations. • vertical integration: The integrating of successive stages in the production and marketing process under the ownership or control of a single management organization.

Growth platforms are specifically named initiatives selected by a business organization to fuel revenue and earnings growth. Growth platforms may be strategic or tactical. Strategic growth platforms are longer-term initiatives for high-scale revenue increases. Generic examples of commonly selected strategic growth platforms include pursuit of specific and new product areas, entry into new distribution channels, vertical or horizontal integration, and new product development. Illustrative examples of growth platforms include: • Apple Computer’s targeting of “personal music systems” to accelerate growth faster than with its personal computer business alone. • IBM’s coining of the term “e-business,” and its subsequent use as the organizing theme for all that the company did in the late 1990s.