Hedgehog Concept by Jim Collins
Understand Your Core Competencies
Visual tools to identify the overlap between corporate drive, its competency and economic growth factors to devise strategies and maximize success.
- Intuitive visual tools to easily map out your hedgehog concept
- Use pre-made templates to identify your organizational strengths and weaknesses
- Export your diagram in PNG, SVG or PDF formats to share or publish
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Establish Your Core Value Proposition
Drag and drop visual tools to create Venn diagrams that identify what the organization is best at doing.
Infinite canvas to represent and study various attributes of your business to identify passions and core competencies.
Advanced linking features to add data straight onto the canvas to analyze business performance in various sectors.
Create a Focused Organizational Vision
Fully customizable visual tools to create unique hedgehog concepts that drive your organization’s purpose.
Data panel to add additional information to items in the three areas - create a context rich canvas that aids in decision making.
Import CSV, Excel or spreadsheets and export a CSV sheet of all the factors you identified which drives the organization towards success.
Go From ‘Good to Great’
Multiple access and role levels. Owner, Editor, Commentor and Viewer roles for workspaces and folders. Control who can access the canvas and identify what performed well and what criteria doesn’t drive the company towards success.
Share workspaces, folders and databases for your entire team. Conduct in depth studies before deciding on your hedgehog statement.
Real-time collaboration with built in video conferencing and live mouse tracking to have seamless discussions and take decisions together.
Pinpoint comments to highlight specific issues or areas of interest on the canvas.
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Templates
Visualize process and user insights with AI templates
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What Is the Hedgehog Concept?
The hedgehog concept originated out of the Greek parable “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Whereas the fox tries many tricks to catch the hedgehog only to fail every time, the hedgehog only does one thing it does well to protect itself - curl up into a ball to expose its spikes.
Inspired by this, the business researcher, Jim Collins, would later introduce the hedgehog concept in his book ‘Good to Great’ as a strategic tool that organizations can use to identify the one thing they are good at to help them survive and succeed. He states that it would take roughly about 4 years to successfully implement the hedgehog concepts within an organization.
How to Find Your Hedgehog Concept?
- The hedgehog concept consists of three circles that contain three questions. They are presented in a 3 set Venn diagram. You can only succeed if your hedgehog concept falls in the intersection of these three circles.
- The first question focuses on what you are passionate about while the second question asks what can you be the best in the world at. The third question gets you to answer what drives your economic engine.
- In order to identify its hedgehog concept, an organization should first understand what its employees are most passionate about. You can find this by observing what excites them and what they consider is important to them.
- In the second step of the hedgehog concept, you need to understand what your organization does best. Once you identify this area, then you can understand how to do it better than anyone else. You can start this step by analyzing your strengths and weaknesses, which you can do using a tool like the SWOT analysis.
- In the third step, you need to find out what your economic engine is or how to generate a continuous flow of income. This is the one KPI or economic denominator that will help you understand how to improve the economic model of your business and increase income. This will help you stand out from your competitors and guide you toward growth.
- Once you have understood the three circles of the model, observe where they overlap. This is where you will find your very own hedgehog concept.
- Review your existing strategy to see if it aligns with your hedgehog concept. Then you can revise your strategy as needed.
- You can use a Creately template to collaborate on understanding the hedgehog concept of your organization with a group of stakeholders. Start with a premade template or create one of your own and share an edit/ review link with others to start working together.