Having gained an understanding of local needs, aspirations, and determinants of value and well-being, the Team’s focus shifts towards the generation of specific ideas and opportunities to be pursued by the Core Team. During this process, it is important that the MNC Team members manage the community’s expectations, being careful not to over-promise on what they can do. Indeed, the Team should not look upon nor represent themselves as possessing solutions for the community’s problems, but instead as participants in a locally-driven effort for positive change.
Three primary tasks are involved in this phase: the co-generation of ideas, the co-evaluation of alternatives, and the retention of knowledge and preservation of options. As previously, both the process and the output should be documented and made available to the community.
Co-generating Ideas
Using participatory methods, the Core Team should engage in a process of idea and opportunity generation with the broader community. This entails bringing the firm’s existing resources and capabilities, as well as those new skills and competencies that it plans to develop, into the discussion. This task is about imagination, about creatively blending the firm’s current and future resource and capability endowment with local resources and socio-economic systems.
Co-evaluating Ideas
Having identified various ideas and opportunities for meeting local needs, the focus shifts to narrowing down the list to those few opportunities to be pursued by the Core Team. Again, a participatory process involving the greater community is the means by which this is done.
The ideas should be assessed against the metrics of mutual value creation created earlier. It is critical to know both the positive and negative implications of an enterprise on the various local constituencies and to ensure that the weakest are, at a minimum, not made worse off through the intervention. The MNC Team should also consider how the various opportunities facilitate the development of new firm capabilities.
Preserving Options & Retaining Knowledge
The Core Team should also make arrangements for ideas that are not selected by the Team but for which there are interested community members. Support might include the provision of resources, technical assistance, or simply establishing a network of contacts that may help identify additional resources. An “idea bank”, for example, could be established which would serve as a knowledge repository for both the Team and the community. In addition, the MNC Team should broaden its linkages back to the firm in an effort to capture the knowledge and insights gained through the visioning process.