Thanks to powerful ideation approaches such as design thinking and
crowdsourcing, it has become incredibly easy and relatively inexpensive
for companies to obtain a vast number of novel concepts, from both
insiders and outsiders such as customers, designers, and scientists. Yet
many organizations still struggle to identify and seize big
opportunities. That’s because major changes in society and technology
fundamentally challenge the conventional understanding of what is
valuable, rendering obsolete whatever criteria companies are using to
identify customer problems they could address. To see which ideas truly
have potential, managers need new assessment criteria. From studying and
working with 24 companies that have succeeded in capturing big
opportunities, the author has devised a process to create such
criteria—one that is rooted not in the art of ideation but in the art of
criticism. It engages a company’s own employees and helps them
articulate their individual visions. These are then compared and
discussed, first in pairs and later in a group, in order to distill them
into a handful of even better proposals. The views of outsiders are
sought only at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]