EXHIBIT 3-4 The tournament structure of the opportunity identification process. The opportunity tournament feeds the product development process with exceptional opportunities.
urce: Terwi esc h a nd U lrich (2009)
process, the goal is to take the opportunity articulated in the mission statement and do everything possible to assure it becomes the best product it can be.
Although opportunity identification and product development can be thought of as
separate activities, there is clearly some overlap between them. For example, in a consumer product business like FroliCat, preliminary product concepts are almost always gener ated and explored with prototypes during the opportunity identification process, before a formal product development process begins. However, these exploratory activities are typi cally conducted for several alternative opportunities, with only the most promising pro ceeding to more comprehensive product design and development. Exhibit 3-5 illustrates the opportunity identification tournament structure used by FroliCat, starting with 50 op portunities and eventually resulting in one chosen to go into full product development.
Effective Opportunity Tournaments
Given that great opportunities are rare, how can the opportunity identification process be managed to increase the number of excellent opportunities identified? There are three basic ways.
I. Generate a large number of op portu nities. If you produce more opportunities, you 'II see more exceptional ones. The logic here is simple: on average, if you find one
7-foot (213 em) tall person per 100,000 people, you'll find two among 200,000. Creat ing more opportunities (without sacrificing their average quality) is thus a key lever in finding the exceptional few.