Yes, I'm still talking about the activities completed in Stage 0. In later stages, very sophisticated methods can be used, but up here in Stage 0 there isn't much data available. Yet, this is when critical decisions impacting your success must be made. The objective of opportunity analysis at this stage is not to forecast returns, it's to compare opportunities relative to each other, and then select the ones that have the most promise. The trick is to reverse engineer your business case. What f...

I'm putting this innovation lifecycle back up to provide context of what I'm addressing. I'm still focusing on Stage 0. In part 1, I talked about idea generation and handling, in this part I'll be talking about opportunity identification, and then part 3 will focus on opportunity analysis. Opportunity Identification: There are people out there who wouldn't know an opportunity if it hit them in the back of the head. Well, in truth most of us are a little like this. As in so many things, part o...

  Basketball fan or not, if you have been anywhere near the news in the last two weeks, there’s a good chance you’ve seen or heard at least one of the following terminologies in reference to the New York Knicks’ out-of-nowhere phenomenon Jeremy Lin: Lin-sanity, Lin-tastic, Lin-sational, Linked-Lin (yes, really), Lin-fatuation, Lin-derella, Super Lin-tendo (my favourite) and I will stop there because the list just seems to goes on and on. But if you have not heard of him, not to worry, be...

I'm putting this innovation lifecycle out here, not because I endorse it; it just happens to be typical. Different companies with different kinds of product will have a different number of stages, and the stage names will be different. However, even in the simplest processes, there are several distinct stages. For different stages, the objectives and type of work performed will be distinctively different. In this post, I'll be talking about Stage 0. Whatever you call it, this is where opportuni...