Innovation areas show you new potential for your company or business field and provide the opportunity to develop the first concrete ideas and innovation projects.
The Trend Radar represents the basis for deriving your innovation areas. With the help of the Trend Radar, you have identified relevant trends for your company or business field and classified them into the Act, Prepare and Watch areas of action. After deriving the innovation areas, these trend evaluations can now be transferred to your individual units of company potential. For this purpose, the evaluated trends have to be set in relation to your company divisions.
Deriving your individual innovation areas
You can now evaluate what significance the trends in the Act, Prepare and Watch categories have for every single division and where the potential – and challenges – lie for future innovation work in your company.
- A good way to start the brainstorming process is to define the most relevant trend for each division. This allows all the participants to enter the discussion and offer their initial thoughts. Try to state clearly what kinds of impact a certain trend, such as blockchain, might have on marketing in general and explicitly with regard to your marketing activities.
- Work with your colleagues to develop ideas on how the evaluated trends could influence your company divisions.
- Consider what concrete possibilities arise from the trends for your individual divisions and where the challenges lie for your company.
- Develop scenarios that could emerge from the relevance of individual trends for your divisions.
- Include existing projects into your considerations too. What are you working on right now and how do the identified trends impact on this?
This is how to proceed with all the trends from your Radar in relation to your business units. You will come across combinable ideas, similar solutions and the same challenges the further you pursue this method. You can now combine the collected ideas, thoughts and scenarios that offer a possible solution to a problem facing your business units or that promise great added value to your stakeholders. Innovation areas can be derived from the overlaps and interfaces.
Support from TRENDONE
This procedure makes it easier for you to manage the Act, Prepare and Watch trends on an individual and targeted basis. TRENDONE assists you with your innovation work, such as when drawing up the innovation areas. In cooperation with your team, we will develop your future innovation strategies.
Worksheet on communication and transparency for the entire company
Use the following template too in order to further consolidate the identified trends and draw up concrete innovation areas. It will help you to identify areas of competence and potential. You can also find this template in your Trendmanager account. When you set up a new innovation area, you can, as an option, fill in the boxes in the template.
The worksheet allows you to transparently show the innovation area’s relevance to the entire company in a way that is easy to understand. Fill in all the boxes with up-to-date information in order to underline the innovation area’s value. With the help of the three dimensions of Market Opportunity, Technological Opportunity and Capabilities and Assets, which you consider with regard to your corporate purpose and your strategy, you will create a transparent picture of your innovation areas. This simplifies the decision-making process and helps you to focus on the most promising innovation projects.
Think about which consequences for your business field will arise from changes to customer behaviour and customer needs. Which trends are connected to the change in consumer behaviour? Also evaluate what added value for your company can be created by focusing on customer demands.
Afterwards, work out which opportunities will result from technological progress to help the company adapt to the changing situation on the market. What technological trends are relevant to your company and your objectives?
Finally, clarify which existing competences your company can already offer and show how they can be matched to the new innovation projects so that the available potential can continue to be used optimally. Then introduce the new competences, tools and resources that you will require to implement the innovation area. All this enables you to create an easy-to-understand innovation area for all stakeholders.