Running Core Improvement and New Growth Under One Roof

Two ways to win — and why one approval process recognises only one

When a board asks for a new growth strategy to offset a maturing core business, most organisations run the resulting proposals through their existing capital approval process: define the stages, require a five-year forecast return, and release funding against delivery milestones. That process was built for a market whose customers, prices and unit economics are already known. Applied across the whole company, it recognises only one way to win.

We call the two strategic modes Shaper and Dominator. The Shaper creates a market or category that does not exist yet and writes its rules; the work is reducing the uncertainty of a conviction, step by step. The Dominator wins a market that already exists, so decisively on cost, speed and reach that competing becomes uneconomic; the work is taking waste and delay out of delivering what people already buy. The distinction descends from James March’s exploration and exploitation (1991). Neither is better, and durable companies use each to support the other — but they need opposite kinds of evidence.

How an organisation quietly drifts into a single-mode strategy

Nobody in an executive team passes a resolution to stop building new businesses. The drift into a single-mode strategy happens mechanically inside the investment committee, driven by the availability of evidence.

Improvement work (Dominator) can forecast its return credibly, because it is extrapolating from a factory, a store network or a customer base that already exists. New-business work (Shaper) cannot, because the thing it would extrapolate from has not been built yet. Put both proposals in front of the same investment committee, using the same financial criteria, and the improvement case wins every time — not on strategic merit, but on the availability of evidence. Run that process for several years and the organisation has quietly become single-mode. Each individual decision was defensible. The cumulative effect was a strategy nobody chose.

What both modes look like in ASEAN and global markets

The clearest regional examples are public. Grab began as ride-hailing and shaped financial-services markets that did not exist for its user base: by the end of 2025 its loan book stood at about US$1.2 billion, more than double a year earlier, in the year it reported its first full-year profit. CP ALL runs the Dominator play in Thai convenience retail: 15,945 7-Eleven stores at the end of 2025, 700 of them opened that year, and ฿462,854 million in convenience-store revenue, built on the cost, logistics and reach of an existing format.

Global companies show the pair working together — and what happens with only one:

1. Both working together.Tesla is read as a Shaper, yet one of its decisive moves was a Dominator’s: gigacasting a car’s underbody to take out manufacturing cost, a structure S&P Global Mobility reports needing two pieces of metal and 1,600 fewer welds. Apple protected the original iPhone with a Dominator’s portfolio discipline: as Brian Merchant recounts, a safer click-wheel prototype and a multi-touch one were developed in parallel until the fragile idea could survive.
2. Only Shaper: you invent the future and risk losing it in the valley.Netflix chose streaming over its profitable DVD business; when it split the two in 2011, its share price fell about 75% from its July high by December before recovering.
3. Only Dominator: you perfect what the market is leaving.Kodak’s film business was world-class; a Kodak engineer, Steve Sasson, built the first digital camera in 1975. Intel perfected one processor architecture while high-value computing moved to parallel chips, and Nvidia replaced it in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in November 2024.

Three governance rules that keep a new growth strategy alive alongside the core

Leaders are already making Shaper moves: in PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey, 42% of CEOs said their company had started to compete in new sectors in the past five years, mostly through approval processes built for Dominator work. Three governance rules keep both modes alive:

1. Separate the evidence bars at the gate.For Dominator work, forecast return is the right test because the baseline exists. For Shaper work, your standard framework will ask for evidence the project cannot produce yet; govern it with staged funding tied to what it has learned and which assumptions it has retired.
2. Make the portfolio split explicit and reviewed.Agree the allocation between core improvement and new-market work at the board level (whether 85/15 or 80/20) and protect the smaller allocation from being raided whenever quarterly core margins tighten.
3. Demand structural redesign inside the Dominator portfolio.Dominator work is not minor cost-cutting; it is redesigning the operating constraints of the core — such as rethinking a retail store-opening sequence (Case 01, where the client measured an approximately 67% shorter cycle) or re-sequencing a turbine overhaul window (Case 02, where the same crews now finish an overhaul in 24 hours instead of 7 days).

What this looks like in Thailand

Large Thai companies are strong Dominators: scale, physical distribution, asset footprint and unit cost are what most conglomerates were built on. That makes the Shaper side the one most likely to be starved, because its proposals are brought to the same group investment committee and judged by criteria designed to protect the core business. Separating the decision criteria inside the leadership team — rather than spinning out a disconnected venture subsidiary — is usually the decisive first step.

Where to start on Monday

Run three checks on your strategy and portfolio governance this week:

1. Classify last year’s spend.Sort every project funded in the last twelve months into Dominator (improving what exists) or Shaper (building what does not yet exist). The actual ratio is almost always more skewed than leadership assumes.
2. Examine the committee criteria, not the project pitches.If one set of financial hurdles governs every proposal, your portfolio is structurally single-mode regardless of what the strategy document says.
3. State and ring-fence the intended balance.Even a modest, protected allocation for Shaper discovery changes which conversations can happen at the investment committee.

Where this does not apply

A Shaper label is not an exemption from rigour. A project that cannot state what would have to be true for it to work is not Shaper work; it is unexamined. Nor should the split be even: for most established companies the Dominator side should be the clear majority. The point is that someone chose the split. Companies named in the market section above are public examples, not our clients.