Identifying opportunities

Research

Three people are working at a coffee table using a laptop and referring to pages of handwritten notes and diagrams. — Choose a type of research that suits your way of working.

Research is a popular tool used to identify opportunities. Whilst this could be typical university style research looking into academic literature and reading through journal articles, it doesn’t have to be. Your research could be as simple as reading certain sections of the newspaper to spot potential opportunities or following a specific hashtag on Twitter to try and find out more about a topic. Research could also involve following major trends, such as the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency, to find opportunities for innovation. You could also look at things like the latest Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker, or the latest Gartner Hype Cycle report from Gartner. These reports are widely read and cited and present technological and social changes around the globe, and are overflowing with opportunities.

ExampleInstant success for Instagram

A great example of the use of research to identify an opportunity is the story of Instagram. Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, were running a social media platform Burbn, but felt it wasn’t achieving what they wanted. They started to conduct research into photography apps, identifying two key leaders - Hipstamatic and Facebook. However, Hipstamatic made it hard to share photos and the Facebook app didn’t have an effective photo-sharing feature.

They decided there was an opportunity to innovate and create something that was easy to use and simplified the process of photo sharing. This comprehensive research process led them to transforming Burbn into a photo sharing platform which today is known as Instagram and had one million users within two months, was sold to Facebook, and now has over 150 million users.

Start researching now

Read through the featured stories section of a newspaper and try and identify at least five opportunities for innovation. For example, you could read a story about a new innovation overseas that could be imitated in Australia or you could find a discussion about a social problem, such as homelessness, and identify an opportunity to address this problem more innovatively.