Strategic focus in open innovation

Succeeding in open innovation, like in any business, requires unwavering focus—focus on your business goals and the right opportunities.

The sheer volume of emerging technologies that can affect your business, or any business for that matter, can be overwhelming. Understanding where the greatest potential impact lies and deciding which use cases and technologies to focus on are crucial steps toward success.

Deciding what to focus on is no easy task. Pursuing a top-down approach by scouting for technologies aligned with your business goals may lead to wasted time in areas where the tech market lacks suitable solutions.

On the flip side, the bottoms-up approach, starting with obvious opportunities in the tech market, tends to be opportunistic and could cause you to miss effective opportunities to achieve your strategic goals, even when a suitable solution is just around the corner.

Balancing both approaches ensures prioritizing opportunities with the most significant impact on your business. By pinpointing where your business goals and the tech market intersect, you can maintain a focus on practical and effective solutions, avoiding opportunistic distractions.

How can you achieve this balance? Here is one way:‍

1 - Top-down Exploration
Begin by creating an initial map of potential use cases aligned with your strategic business goals

2 - Preliminary Market Research
Then, conduct an initial scan of the tech market, evaluating various technology solutions based on the maturity of tech segments and selected impact factors. These impact factors are crucial, as you'll use them later for prioritization. Choose impact factors that align with your business objectives, be it reducing expenses, generating new revenues, increasing customer retention, or enhancing sustainability.

3 - Prioritization
Based on this analysis, prioritize the use cases with the highest potential impact. Build a roadmap of actionable use cases for open innovation.

This is the core concept, with much more depth to explore. By completing this process, you've successfully pinpointed where your business goals intersect with the dynamic landscape of the tech market. This ensures that your efforts are directed toward use cases most likely to drive real business impact.

At SOSA, we call this framework "Opportunity Mapping." It serves as a powerful tool to navigate the landscape of emerging technologies, identify actionable use cases and practical applications, gain visibility into their potential impact on your business goals, and prioritize your efforts. Most importantly, it keeps you focused on the opportunities that will drive the biggest impact on your business.