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Opportunity discovery is a process of innovation that gives companies a systematic way to explore opportunities, zeroing in on those with the greatest promise for their business. In the pressure of daily operations, companies may jeopardize their future competitiveness and growth by failing to explore new business opportunities. In the 1970s, SRI International devised an opportunity-discovery process that gave companies the means to manage innovation. Since then, SRIC-BI has conducted hundreds of workshops for companies in a wide variety of industry sectors, giving clients the opportunity to brainstorm with world-class technical and market experts.
Typically, the opportunity-discovery process aims to develop new business opportunities or new product concepts, but clients have also used the process to define new R&D directions, new issues for inclusion in strategic planning, and new opportunities for marketing, human-resource, or corporate-affairs groups within their organizations. Projects may focus on:
- New markets for existing products
- New markets for existing technical or business capabilities
- Diversification opportunities that capitalize on the company's strengths
- New products from existing materials and skills
- New processes for manufacturing desired products.
| SRIC-BI Opportunity-Discovery Process |
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At the end of the process, companies will have:
- Identified hundreds of ideas
- Selected the best opportunities
- Identified immediate commercialization needs, including market and technical analyses, business plans, product-development plans, partnering requirements, and due diligence.
Many of our clients consider the process so valuable that they come back to us for additional workshops or ask us to train their organizations in the techniques.
Case Studies
New Uses of Natural Gas
The client wanted to find new uses that would consume gas, identify barriers to known uses of natural gas, and explore approaches for eliminating these barriers. In a three-day workshop, SRIC-BI experts and client participants generated more than 1000 ideas in four key technology areas: surface science, new engineered materials, artificial intelligence, and human-environment engineering. They then reduced these ideas to approximately 50 research concepts and ranked the concepts according to their technical feasibility, eventually selecting the 12 most promising concepts for further exploration. |
Identification of New Applications for a New Monomer
The chemical group of a North American paper company asked SRIC-BI to help it identify end-use applications and markets for a new, proprietary family of monomers and related polymers. SRIC-BI convened a team of market specialists, process engineers, and scientists to help the company identify and evaluate a wide spectrum of end-use markets. As a result, the client expanded its coating-resins portfolio to include higher-growth products and extended its use to other applications, such as inks. The company is now test-marketing resins and evaluating synergistic links with its existing coatings and paper business. |
Opportunity-Search Training
SRIC-BI's opportunity-search methodology assists managers in their business-development efforts by aligning financial, market, and technology objectives with external trends and driving forces. In the search for new opportunities for business growth, senior executives need to combine a broad view of a market landscape with carefully constructed criteria to assure a comprehensive view of opportunities and selection of implementable businesses.
SRIC-BI hosted a four-day training course for approximately 10 to 20 of the client's executives and managers at a time. The curriculum, based on SRIC-BI's proven approaches, included the key elements of SRIC-BI's technology intelligence, idea generation and selection, and opportunity profiling. SRIC-BI course facilitators who have experience in opportunity generation and selection and commercialization used a combination of lectures, case studies, and breakout groups during the course.
The course included an opportunity search in flat-panel displays (particularly materials and subcomponents areas) to illustrate the methodology and give the participants some hands-on experience. |
Relevant Research Programs
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