Single Technologies – Strategy on a visual one-pager put our business plan in motion

To enter our strategy into the visual plan helped us formulate a clear desired position, identify essential capabilities, and define common strategic goals.

Single Technologies

Company:
Single Technologies

Industry:
Medtech

Country:
Sweden

"To enter our strategy into the visual plan helped us formulate a clear desired position, identify essential capabilities, and define common strategic goals. As we now implement the strategy it is very powerful to track the degree of completion of different activities and immediately see if any is encountering issues."

Single was founded in 2014 as a unique combination of PhD research from the Royal Institute of Technology and R&D in the fiber optical grating industry. A strong multidisciplinary team is pushing the limits of what the industry assumes is possible when it comes to sequencing and Big Data generation.

The Challenge

It was a challenge to take newly explored research and technology to the market with a combined effort to bring all the science disciplines together into a concerted effort.

We needed to come up with a commonly understandable and agreed upon overall purpose and strategic objectives among our scientists to begin with. Secondly, we needed to structure the organization to deliver against the overall purpose and objectives.

The common goal – The Nobel Purpose

In general, for scientific environments, most special skills have their own unique understanding and purpose. At first, we were all skeptical about VisPlan methodology, mostly because it started from the very basics in language building.

But we found the methodology was very efficient by bringing fundamental language rules to the strategy process and how to formulate the plan content. We came up with a very strong definition of our business purpose: “We instigate 3-D Seq to decompile the coding of life” and clearly defined strategic objectives to get there.

Capability – Driven Strategy

The next step was to structure the organization. 

Originally, we were inclined to do it by normal standards, that is by functions. But as VisPlan methodology recommended to structure the plan by capabilities, we started to think in terms of “Which are our capabilities” and “What capabilities do we need to meet our common goals”.

In the end we did not just structure a capability-driven business plan, but also choose to organize the company according to the capabilities we identified as essential to reach our strategic objectives.