> Enabling is a feature of a project or a process that creates necessary conditions, tools, or rules that help opportunity to materialise. Catching a unique growth opportunity is luck. However, how often that luck arrives depends on the state of the organizational and external environment that affects initiative flow. [[Absorption]] assumes the environment supplies opportunities, and that the organization's job is to reach far or deep enough, select well, and pull them in. But opportunities do not simply exist. Their rate, shape and timing are produced by markets, technical standards, regulation and norms, and an organization can act on all four. A founder does not bring a partnership idea to an organization with **no door to knock on** and **no sign that knocking works**. Opening the door and putting a sign is enabling. 1. Foundation: enabling creates or alters useful conditions, tools, or rules. 2. Catalyst: while an enabler doesn't solve the related challenge directly, it removes a roadblock. 3. Multiplier effect: once in place, a wider range of initiatives, at higher success probability and effect magnitude, can be executed. Enablers produce value by letting it flow, but they don't capture it: capture happens where an absorptive engine already exists to receive what enabling creates. Otherwise, positive effect is either wasted or captured by other organizations. - If conditions are moving, that's enabling. - If a named resource is moving, that's absorption. Enabling may be oriented inside or outside of the organization, depending on where conditions, tools, or rules are enforced. Related corpo-words are: strategic foundation, catalyst, infrastructure. ### Not managing enabling Objective understanding and design of the internal and external environment of an organization may nerf or boost the results of a project. Setup often holds the answer to why a great project on paper failed in real life. However, organizations often treat setup as a constant, fixed element. **Managing a portfolio of enabling initiatives** should be as obvious for non-core growth as marketing, PR and GR are for the core business. The conscious naming in the organization I saw for enablers was a set of strategic projects (no P&L, or no normal payoff). Though every project or process in an organization has an enabling feature: its mere existence and execution open doors for something new. **In terms of absorption and disruptive growth, monitoring and managing the most powerful enablers makes a big difference.** Manage enablers to improve things like: - testing new hypotheses faster, by letting partners or agents do the work on their side; - increasing resource inflow, by marketing the organization's needs and attractiveness; - lowering the cost of strategic initiatives, by setting up clear rules, policies, and brand. ### Action directions Enablers do one of three things to opportunity formation. **Block.** Suppress formation. Standards that lock out a substitute technology, licensing regimes that raise the cost of entry, patent positions held defensively. **Regulate.** Direct where opportunities form, so that they form within reach and in a shape that fits the organization. Regulating is selective blocking plus orchestration: it obliges other market players to follow a pattern of change that suits the organization. Leading an open banking initiative is the type. **Grow.** Raise the rate at which opportunities form. A startup growth programme, education for future founders, funded research in an adjacent field. The organization does not choose which opportunities appear, only that more of them do. ### What this is not **Enabling is not a transaction**. The organization sets up a change in the conditions under which opportunities appear and develop. **Not a class of project.** Every initiative carries some trace of "enabling". The scale of this effect determines whether that trace is worth managing. **Not independent of core business.** An enabler may affect everything. There may be an effect on the market that fortifies competitors, increasing competition and harming the core. ### Related theory [Jacobides, Cennamo & Gawer (2018)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.2904) Actors who control a bottleneck capture a disproportionate share of value they did not create. [Nenonen, Storbacka & Windahl (2019)](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-019-00643-z) identify capabilities for market shaping, and concede the tension directly: shapers tend to prioritise long-term value creation for customers and stakeholders over value capture for themselves. [Flaig, Kindström & Ottosson (2021)](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13162-021-00209-9) distil 79 shaping cases into three phases: infusion of change, formation of the market, retention of the shaped market.