Executive summary
The Quantumrun Foresight Platform (QFP or Platform) features an Ideation Engine project interface that can guide and partially automate your team’s product, service, policy, or business model conceptualization process in a manner that incorporates a comprehensive range of emerging trends. Put another way, it’s an automated brainstorming tool that can help your team come up with new business ideas.
Challenge to solve
78% of the companies we surveyed failed to effectively incorporate emerging trends into their product, service, or business model development initiatives. As a result, these companies faced increased exposure to risk from outside disruption and lost revenue due to missed market opportunities.
Solution
Use our platform’s Ideation Engine project interface to visually group platform trend insights in ways that will help your team intuitively discover and brainstorm innovative ideas for new products, services, policy ideas, and business models.
Applying the Ideation Engine in your product development workflow
Depending on your organization’s goals, there are a variety of product development models your organization can follow to achieve its business and innovation objectives. On the whole, these product development models generally align with the following stages:
Standard product development process
What are the organization’s strengths and the resources at its disposal? SWOT, financial review, etc. What is the current state of the market that the organization operates in or wants to enter, in all contexts? What are the potential future states of the market that the organization operates in or wants to enter, in all contexts? What information/data does the organization need to know to make informed decisions about its future products, services, or business models? Collect inspiration from a diverse range of sources and stakeholders. Brainstorm potential ideas (possibly use the Blue Ocean strategy or the product-market matrix) for new or improved products, services, or business models.
For each potential idea/offering ideated: What are their strengths and weaknesses? Do they fit with the company’s strategic objectives? Is there a market or can a market be created for this new or improved offering? What are the offering’s costs, profits, and potential sales calculated at different price points? Does the offering generate interest from early focus groups and other human testing programs?
Detailed specifications for the product are developed. The product’s features and pricing are established.
The actual offering is prototyped and manufacturing and supply chain processes are designed.
The offering is tested, first in the lab, and then with real customers. Depending on the feedback generated, the product development process may revert backward several phases.
The offering is made available to customers.
The offering is evaluated as to whether it is delivering the appropriate value to consumers, as well as meeting the firm’s business goals. Depending on the market reaction to this offering, the product development process may revert backward several phases.
Platform integration with the product development process
Based on the simplified outline above, the QFP can facilitate elements of this product development process in the following ways:
The QRP’s trend curation interface will help your team identify current and emerging trends across a broad cross-section of industries, professions, countries, topics, and more that can identify new opportunities or threats to build around or directly inspire new products, services, and business models. Once your team has curated a collection of trends and insights into Lists using our trend curation interface, you can then convert these Lists into an Ideation Engine project interface. Here, the Ideation Engine will then visually and automatically group these trends and insights in ways that can inspire new market offerings. Inside the 3D graph, look for clusters or groupings of trend content. These clusters indicate hidden relationships between trends. Click/open each of these trend circles to read more about the trend articles/links in the cluster to research what these hidden relationships might be. Once the relationship(s) is found, use that insight to ideate new market offerings to capitalize on this insight.
The Ideation Engine project interface includes a custom forum that enables collaboration and promotes discussion around product valuation.
Using the QRP’s trend curation interface, your organization can comprehensively explore the market you are building into across a variety of industries, professions, countries, and topics. This trend intelligence will inspire your team about what product features to include or exclude for development.
Using the QRP’s trend curation interface, your organization can stay on top of potential new materials, and manufacturing and supply chain trends that may impact your product or service’s development process.
Not applicable.
Not applicable.
As your team executes your go-to-market execution, the market reaction to this offering may prompt further iterations on your offering. This Ideation Engine project interface can be reused to further refine your offering.
How to use the Ideation Engine
To learn about the various features of the Ideation Engine project interface, please click here.
To learn tips and tactics about how to effectively use the Ideation Engine project interface, please click here.
To learn more about the methodology behind the Ideation Engine project interface or start your free trial of the platform, please contact a Quantumrun Foresight representative at Platform@Quantumrun.com
