Collect Innovation Opportunities
Identify innovative ideas to overcome concrete business challenges
This method helps a team identify current innovation blockers in a business area and discover innovation ideas to solve them. It is aimed at strategic decision makers in an organization, such as IT and Business leads, looking for new ways to achieve their business goals now and in the future.
GOAL
Identify innovation ideas to overcome concrete challenges
PARTICIPANTS
Department leads from business and IT, project sponsors, strategic decision makers
TIME NEEDED
90 minutes
PHASE
Explore
Before You Start
- Identify Your Business Challenges
- Before looking at ideas how to overcome concrete challenges, it is a good idea to have created a list of challenges, external risks, internal barriers and proposed solutions that can be used as starting point to identify potential innovation projects:
- It is also recommended to send the Business Challenges questionnaire to 4 or 5 different leads of the business area you want to focus on. Use the template provided to collect the answers for challenges, external risks and internal barriers. Use answers as inputs to step 1 (see below).
Materials you will need
Templates for Download
Templates for Virtual Collaboration
Steps
Creating a collection of innovation opportunities includes several steps. We recommend completing them in one session.
Review the submitted Business Challenges questionnaires
Review the collected Challenges, External Risks and Internal Barriers with all participants and add any missing aspects during an open discussion.
If you have not sent the questionnaire, you can still ask participants to quickly brainstorm Challenges, External Risks and Internal Barriers during the session.
Brainstorm solution ideas
Brainstorm silently as many solution ideas as possible to overcome the previously discussed challenges, external risks and internal barriers. Share out your ideas.
The brainstormed ideas should be concrete tangible solutions such as a new application, a specific change in a current process or approach.
Try to avoid too general ideas such as “increase efficiency” or “improve quality”. Indicate rather how and with what means do you envision such result.
Form idea clusters
Form use-case idea clusters by combining solution ideas with challenges, external risks and internal barriers. Every cluster should contain at least one idea and one challenge. Name the clusters as they get formed. You can use the idea in the cluster as the cluster name.
See Completed Example
You're done!
Combine this method with the Use Case Definition method to convert your use-case idea clusters into more concrete use-cases.
To learn how your use-case ideas can be implemented with SAP technologies, carry out a Use Case Exploration workshop.