The business design sprint: a new innovation method developed by MakerLab for ALfB

Even if you are in an innovative business, using an outside agency like MakerLab can provide a fresh perspective. Niels Strybos and Erwin Lenaers are founders of the Belgian company Acco Learn for Business (ALfB). Just as MakerLab answers business questions, they solve learning issues within companies. ALfB is growing fast, but where to next? What market is lucrative long-term? How do you ensure recurring revenue in this type of consulting work?

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We spoke with Niels Strybos and MakerLabs' own David Lijnse about it.

Can you explain a little more about ALfB?

Niels: 'ALfB is a branch within Acco, an educational and scientific publisher in the Netherlands and Belgium with its own printing house and a few bookstores. We focus on learning within companies, lifelong learning is what we call it.'

David: 'For example, an electrician has to re-certify once a year. For this, ALfB offers online and offline teaching methods to the organizations that issue this certification.'

Niels: "We are actually consultants. We provide knowlegde and expertise. Suppose your company wants to provide internal training to employees, and you don't know how to deliver that training. In that case, we assist in the development of learning experiences.'

You haven't been around very long.

Niels: "Four years ago, ALfB was founded from the concept of a start-up within the parent company. It was an exploration of new opportunities and revenue streams. During the go-to-market phase, we intended to target the medical sector but ended up assisting educational centers that had to pivot due to the pandemic and didn't know how to go about it. We did know how. This allowed us to quickly secure numerous projects, which was a promising beginning.

Sounds like there is plenty of innovativeness. Why do you need MakerLab?

Niels: "Growth pains" isn't the right term, but ALfB is growing rapidly. And that means we need to also consider the future because there are several challenges ahead of us. Erwin and I knew MakerLab from the past and decided to pose an open question: where should we go in the future? What direction is the best one?

David: "You came to us with two challenges: the potential of the medtech market and the technology demand to generate recurring revenue separate from the existing consulting model.

Niels: "True. We weren't yet certain about how to position our service in this new market. And whether this is indeed the target audience we should focus on. Additionally, as a start-up, we are constantly exploring sustainable business models; the question of recurring revenue was also significant. Whether there was a need, for example, to develop and market proprietary software.'

And was it?

Niels: "In the end, the answer turned out to be no.

David: "In the high quality of your provided service, the consultancy itself holds the real power.

But there was no such answer right away.

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Niels: 'True. The art of MakerLab is that they challenge you to think and also make you admit that you don't actually know yet.'

David: "They needed some kind of design sprint, but strategic in nature and focused on business development. So we came up with something new: the business design sprint.'

What's new about it?

David: "In a design sprint, you brainstorm and develop solutions for a problem of your target audience and validate which one works best. In a business design sprint, we, however, take into account the complete business model. What happens when we start making adjustments to it?'

Niels: "I think it's great that after we started, you guys figured out pretty quickly that we had to make this broader. So not just: how do we generate fixed revenue? But more: what strategic steps should we take for the future?'

What does such a business design sprint look like?

David: "We have created a five-day program, with a research phase of several months between the first three days and the last two. In those initial days, we examined how the company is structured. Afterward, the ambitions were discussed. Where does that goal on the horizon lie?'

Niels: 'I can go on and on about certain things, Erwin too - it's in our DNA. You were very good at indicating: okay, that's where the pain point is. Let's zoom in and see how we can eliminate those gaps.

David: "Certainly. What is the headwind you're experiencing? And what tailwind do you have, the strength you can draw from your own team, helping you reach that point on the horizon?'

Niels: "From all that information, a number of possible scenarios emerged with some research questions. With those questions we set to work. We explored the market, explored the technological choice and made informed decisions.'

And then, two months later...

Niels: 'In that second part of the sprint, we have taken significant steps in the field of service design, as David calls it. Towards professionalization and expansion.'

David: 'We have defined hotspots for all strategic scenarios where they can make improvements and provided actions: if you address this, you can validate small steps and experiment to automate and enhance processes. This allowed Niels and Erwin to get started right away in order to achieve a goal.'

Niels: "For example, we had once done a pilot for a medtech company and had a good feeling about it. But we also knew we didn't know everything; David was able to pinpoint exactly what we didn't know yet. He made it concrete: what do these customers need, how are the decision-making processes structured, how are you going to convince them?'

David: "You , more then anything else, needed a plan of action and guidance on how to tackle the challenges.

Niels: "It helped me tremendously to formulate a strategy that I could also communicate to management.

Sprints are hugely intensive.

Niels: "MakerLab conducts these sprints intensively for a good reason - you delve deep into the subject matter in a short amount of time, with greater focus.

David: 'It makes the team closer. Everyone gets the opportunity to put on the table what isn't going well or where there might still be questions or concerns.'

Niels: "Both Erwin and I have done similar trajectories in the past. It is often felt that such sessions are better organized over a longer period of time, but you notice that this does not always improve motivation and productivity. MakerLab is to the point and hands on. It is much more dynamic. After you sit together for three days for such a sprint, you also have to let it go and just start doing it.'

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