What do gardening and strategic planning have in common? With the new website ‘Strategy Garden’ (www.strategy-garden.net), the editors behind the KB Strategy & Vision SIG launch one of the first open source communities for modern strategic planning instruments.

Gardening is about good timing, dealing with unpredictability, benefiting from experience, but also about continuous, hands-on work. Similar traits are required for corporate strategising. To harvest the fruits of successful strategy development, like in gardening, the use of latest planning instruments and tips of seasoned strategists might well represent a winning combination.

Fraunhofer IAO and Usymbio have launched the Strategy Garden as an exchange platform for management consultants, strategic planners and decision makers. As one of the first open source communities for modern strategy development, it offers ideas, methods, tips and tools for the strategic planning of fast growing enterprises.

All workshop materials (e.g. templates, posters and manuals) are freely available under a creative commons license.

Strategy Garden tools are designed to be used in 1-2 day workshops. Instead of endless checklists and data sheets, the workshop material – especially large visual templates – help to identify, visualise, analyse and select strategic options. Each tool includes all necessary information to facilitate a workshop and addresses a particular strategic issue, such as e.g. "How to grow?", “Where to compete?” and “How to become more profitable?” As in gardening, profitable strategies can so blossom in a playful manner. The tools have been developed and tested in collaboration with German, Swiss, Spanish and Israeli SMEs.

As in comparable open source communities, we invite you to use the solutions currently offered, to make comments for improvement or to suggest your own workshop tools. Next steps might include for example case studies, additional resources, translations into other languages, user experiences, and many more.