Identifying opportunities worth pursuing

Opportunity Identification ensures that product, service or brand concepts are grounded in a solid understanding of consumer needs, segment size, market trends, and competition. Areas where the market is changing are ripe for identifying opportunities.

Success starts with the identification of market opportunity.

We have two ways of filtering and assessing opportunities: looking through a cultural lens and looking through a business lens.

Cultural Opportunity Assessments

When we refer to culture, we don’t mean ethnicity, though this may certainly play a role. Looking for innovation opportunities through a cultural lens means being sensitive to underlying themes that people express.

While people cannot always directly describe the product, service or brand they want, by observing how they live or interact with products, we can uncover what they find meaningful and where their lives could be improved or enriched.

Our approach to Cultural Opportunity Assessments

There are really two primary components to a cultural opportunity assessment – segmenting how people differ (segmentation) and going deep within one or more of these groups to gain a richer understanding of their lives. This is where having a nuanced understanding of the meanings that people seek is important.

Our approach incorporates a range of qualitative and quantitative methods including ethnography and digital ethnography, work sessions, and knowledge visualization techniques, all of which are used to learn:

Trends and motivations
Lifestyles and values
Common usage and experience scenarios
Pain points and unfulfilled needs
Feelings toward competitive offerings

Business opportunity assessments

Business opportunity assessments help clarify the type of investment and commitment you must make to successfully deliver innovation within a particular industry. This type of assessment provides valuable information for setting realistic goals, defining boundaries, determining partnerships or alliances, and integrating appropriate trends and technology.

Our approach to Business Opportunity Assessments

A truly useful business assessment consists of an evaluation of current and comprehensive market data, business practices, client data, and business analytics. Some of the areas we seek to cover include:

Opportunities and threats in the market
Size and growth of the current or potential market
Market structure
Political, economic, social and technological factors/risks to consider worldwide
Barriers to entry
Technologies/innovations being adopted and by whom

Together, a cultural and business market assessment provide an integrated narrative creating a framework for evaluating business dynamics and clarifying a starting point for innovation and design. With this background, concept creation becomes an act of filling a market need, rather than searching for a customer.