How do you spot innovation opportunities?

To understand how to spot innovation opportunities, we first need to define what an opportunity is for a corporation. If you are a company that makes a 100 billion turnover, then a 1 million dollar opportunity is insignificant, compared to a company that makes 10 million in revenue. Large companies have problems detecting ‘small’ opportunities be-cause it dilutes their growth rate - and this is a weakness since some of these small opportunities could be tomorrow's big businesses - hence the stories about Netflix disrupting Blockbuster and other known examples. In order to make innovation work within a corporate environment, innovation teams must consider this weakness when reviewing ideas and designing innovation processes.

More specifically, innovation leaders must provide predictable time-lines along with an end-to-end innovation process. Most of the time in-novation is seen as a ‘black box’. The lack of understanding of what’s happening inside this ‘black box’ - the potential of certain innovation activities - usually makes leaders question the return on investment of in-novation programs. As a result, innovation programs or teams and labs are usually put on hold or shut down – only to be resumed/ re-established afterward - a costly and time/energy-consuming situation. In an end-to-end innovation process – one that takes an idea from concept to implementation and then to scale - there are pre-defined metrics, goals, and deliverables per phase – and the innovation/ venture team has to demonstrate progress against these goals at certain points throughout this process [ ... ]