Special Topics

Business Opportunity Management: searching for and assessing new ideas in the marketplace

Valuable ideas for new products, services, fields of business, processes, and procedures can fuel a company’s growth. On the one hand, there may already be a lot of ideas within the company as a result of customer visits, customer service contacts, and discussions with business partners. On the other, creativity and a systematic approach as well as technological analysis can produce and combine new ideas. Not every idea is automatically a business opportunity. Ideas have to be assessed with a view to their potential, sustainability, and compliance with the company’s innovation strategy and roadmap.

Helbling takes a structured approach, even in the creative space:

• Always start with the market: Define, sketch out, and describe the strategic fields of business for which profitable business opportunities with growth potential are sought.
• Cast a broad net: Draw up a “map of opportunities”. This will serve as a guide when searching for attractive ideas and will help to flag up gaps.
• Work out innovation drivers for future free cash flows.
• The procedure and methods should be geared to the following aspects: Examples are analogies, discussions with experts, institutions, and potential customers/users, “blue sky thinking”, shadowing, peer group analysis, lifestyle trends, trend evaluation, etc.
• Take it one step at a time: Select, combine, and assess ideas in a step-by-step process. The assessment criteria help with prioritizing on the basis of the innovation strategy and roadmap.

A business case illustrates the free cash flow potential of the best ideas as well as the opportunities and risks for the company.