Opportunities, how do you manage them?

In the company Easy Innovation Ecosystem, we have been working for a few years to offer solutions to Innovation. We wanted to take advantage of the offer of Environmental Ideas, to publish a post to give our point of view on managing opportunities and some practical advice.

An opportunity is an action that will bring us value, usually in economic terms. However, not all the ideas we have are an opportunity for our entity. The reasons may be: lack of capacity, lack of time, etc.

We generate ideas based on all the information that comes to us and the knowledge we have about our company and the sector. To do this, we use this and many other blogs, social networks, forums, etc. to read news and updates about initiatives, changes of interest in the market (trends, regulations, etc.), innovations, advice on how to do it, etc.

Let's take as an example some of the posts published on this same blog:

• The Europe 2020 strategy in the Spanish economy
• Cold door or hot door? BNI Nexus
• GENERATE D-GENERATE

While reading it, we make an assessment that can range from considering it as a curiosity, giving us an idea about how to take advantage of it, a threat or irrelevant to our interests.

The question that comes up is And now what?. Here, we all follow our strategies, better or worse, following a method or our experience. In any case, we will agree that the way to treat it will depend on the reaction time. What's more, an analysis must be carried out to determine if this is an opportunity or will result in a waste of time and resources.

If you are interested in good practices, we would like to recommend AENOR's UNE 166000 standards, on”R+D+i Management”. In them you can find the proposal for the innovation cycle in a company. This cycle shows the phases that an idea must go through until it becomes an opportunity. Although oriented to the innovation processes necessary to implement these ideas, easy adaptations can be made to adapt it to any type of opportunity.

Basically, the process can be described in two phases:

1. Search and generation of ideas: consists of treasuring all the ideas that arise in the company or from external sources of information.
2. Feasibility analysis and selection of ideas: evaluate the viability of the idea from all points, to determine if it is an opportunity.
   3. Project Portfolio Management: add a project to your portfolio to plan the development of those selected opportunities, prioritize them and provide them with resources for development and commercialization.

At this point, we all know the potential results, in the form of new ideas, of the effort to have a follow-up or active participation in all these forums, but nothing assures us of success Would there be any means to optimize that effort?

La Technological Surveillance and Competitive Intelligence are the answer, making the search and generation of ideas more effective. La Technological Surveillance (VT) refers to the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in the automated monitoring of digital sources (places where news or information of interest is published digitally). There is a misconception of VT, which is something exclusive for monitoring developments in terms of technology and research (technological advances, scientific community, patents, etc.). However, VT covers any aspect of interest to the company, such as the market (competitors, new products, customers, aids/grants, tenders, legal news, listings, etc.) or advances in research (scientific community, patents, etc.). When algorithms are used to process all this information, conclusions and analysis can be drawn about trends and situations (market trends, identification of potential customers, brand and product reputation, market analysis, etc.). All of these algorithms and techniques are called Competitive Intelligence.

Some points to consider when identifying opportunities of interest:

• Remember “time is money”; keeping a personal track of everything that is published in your professional circles can be very absorbing. Evaluate if what it gives you compensates for what it requires of you.
• It uses Technological Surveillance and Competitive Intelligence systems, which help you to follow, extract and highlight the information that interests you most, helping you to optimize your effort and arrive at information that was previously out of your reach. In some cases, it can be the difference between arriving on time and in good condition or not.
• Turn to your trusted experts and analyze if your ideas have a real chance of turning into opportunities.
• Contrast, read the original source as well as similar publications and everything relevant to acquire judgment to make the decision whether it is an opportunity or just an idea.
• Think about whether with your current media you have sufficient mechanisms to know the best possibilities and market movements (competition and customers).
• Assess what impact the opportunities your competition takes advantage of on your competitiveness, if they will become future threats, and if you will be able to react and at what cost.