Levels of Business Development: There are three levels of business development such as 1. Product level, 2. Commercial level and 3. Corporate level.
Detailed levels of business development are as under:
1. Product level Development: At the product level development is meant developing a new product or technology. Though product level of development may differ from firm to firm. Product level development can be separated into two categories i.e. 1. Disruptive and 2. Incremental.
Disruptive or discontinuous development are completely new things developed from scratch while incremental developments are a development which increases the functionality of an existing platform or technology i.e. of an incremental continuous development is extension to already existing products such as a new odour for shampoo, a digital camera with 5MIO pixels for your cellular phone. In both of the cases the platform, cellular phone and shampoo remains the same.
2. Commercial Level Development: At the commercial level development is meant new segments or markets by cold contact. The work needs an extremely driven psychologically strong person capable of handling lots of turn downs. It is surely not suited for the faint of heart. The next level of commercial business development is sales organization or channel setup. The sales organization or sales may consist of partners, distributors, agents, licensees, franchisees or your national or international branches where agent means somebody who is representing a principal in exchange for the sake of commission on forwarded clients. In most cases these agents are called dealers, resellers, value added resellers etc. And finally in the commercial level, business development at the value chain level and in the value chain level business development is about developing the whole product offering.
3. Corporate level development: At the corporate level development is meant about implementing mergers and acquisition (M & A), direct equity investment (DEI), joint ventures (JV) and strategic alliances. Basically it deals with corporate finance, business portfolio analysis, contract law, social law, fiscal law, anti trust law, culture management and change management etc. Business organizations may have various motives to buy organizational competencies. For instances, patent protection, legal constraints, time to market entry barriers, proposal or business complementation, profit diversification and cash flow etc.
