Building an Opportunity Pipeline

Developed and implemented a sustainable process that enabled a large engineering company to create a steady pipeline of large growth opportunities.

 

Building a reliable process for innovating in the new space

In an effort to remain competitive, a company recognized the importance of building a pipeline of fresh opportunities.  But finding a way to reliably generate and capitalize on new ideas beyond incremental innovations in the core was a challenge.  The missing piece was a method to systematically understand the opportunity landscape and generate compelling opportunities that would prompt a sustainable investment into the development programs.

Identifying “Big” Opportunities, Reducing Uncertainty, Driving Investment

Working with the “new business” group, we designed and developed frameworks that use systematic and parallel understanding of market and technology trends.  These frameworks allowed the development teams to pin-point which challenges along the evolving value chains were the best match with the company’s capabilities and mapped out what partnerships would be required to successfully deliver the value.   Our process not only identified new growth opportunities, but also provided a mechanism for managing the critical pieces of a program’s uncertainty and investment staging. This brought the pipeline to life, allowing the identified ideas to advance into an early commercialization stage.

New ways of working

Today, the new process that we created serves as the foundation for new business development, some of which was transformational to the company. It resulted in an active portfolio of new opportunities, increasing the overall R&D portfolio net present value by one-third, and individual opportunities 10-100 times greater than a typical “new product” project.