Corporate Development in 2027
Corporate Development will become “Grow Dev.”
Corporate Development, a company's M&A efforts, mainly to spur growth at a company will look different by the year 2027. Driving this morphosis is a longer-term shift towards a growth first mindset, either inorganically or organically, and a tech-first product-driven company model versus engineering or sales-driven models.
All companies will be “tech” companies in the future — they will incorporate technologies into their functions, operations, and products. This trend almost seems a forgone conclusion. We are now seeing companies function and managed in more traditional technology ways: engineering departments, product roadmaps, CMO act like CTOs, enterprise software and collaborative tools, cloud and SaaS everything including sales forces and HR. What’s left to emphasize? Growth of platform or service via the excellence of the product. The orb of the product teams will grow while other functions will shrink.
Historically when companies have grown they have thought: a) how can we gain more customers via business development and cross-selling b) sell more to existing customers c) create a new strategy to enter new markets and create new products/customers/revenues. There are many more growth ideas, but these are all organic ideas, using mostly existing capabilities…