Shaping things to come: strategies for creating alternative enterprises

The training community needs to place more emphasis on innovation, corporate venturing and the generation of new income streams. Standard offerings and common courses provide the same capabilities as everyone else, whereas a bespoke approach might enable people to be different and allow them to create fresh intellectual capital. Following the herd, playing catch‐up, copying and “me‐too” activities are not the route to market leadership. Those responsible for training and development should consider whether their current portfolio of courses and their coaches and mentors are contributing to uniformity, stock attitudes and commodity knowledge or stimulating diversity by enabling each person to play to their particular strengths and achieve their individual aspirations. Trainers, developers, coaches and mentors should enable colleagues to provide customers with additional and distinctive options that are genuine alternatives to those currently on offer.