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Opportunity Discovery

Opportunity discovery helps companies move from their current business portfolio into new technology or market spaces.

Opportunity discovery is a systematic innovation process that generates new ideas, combines them to form potential opportunities, and then identifies the most promising ones for analysis that establishes the basis for commercial development.

It had its beginnings at SRI International in the 1970s. Since then, Strategic Business Insights (SBI) has conducted hundreds of opportunity-discovery workshops and related analyses for companies in a wide variety of industry sectors.

Typically, opportunity-discovery projects aim to develop new businesses, products, and services that are based on the client's current capabilities. The process has also been in use successfully to identify new R&D directions, define new approaches for marketing, and address various issues for human resources and corporate affairs.

The diagram below illustrates the key elements in the opportunity-discovery process.

SBI Opportunity-Discovery Process

Through the workshop process, clients will have:

  • Identified hundreds of ideas
  • Created dozens of potential opportunities
  • Rated and then selected the most promising opportunities.

Following the workshop, SBI and the client develop opportunity profiles that:

  • Represent a first-cut description of each promising opportunity
  • Provide sufficient analysis to determine whether to pursue the opportunity further
  • Pave the way for next steps such as more in-depth market and technical feasibility studies, customer research, and strategic roadmapping.

Like our other consulting services, opportunity-discovery projects are designed around our diverse group of knowledgeable consultants who actively conduct research across a wide range of technologies and markets.