• by David Warren , May 10, 2012

Good business ideas occasionally die an unnatural and premature death. While benchmarks, stage gates, and filters can help prevent bad -- and costly -- decisions, sometimes ideas are just ahead of their time.
 
Revisited periodically, a company’s inventory of dead and discarded ideas may become the source of new opportunities. While few ideas can deliver the kind of transformative growth that business leaders salivate over, looking at clusters of ideas -- linked by similar benefits and dependencies --can result in rich, diversified, and durable growth platforms.

Breakthrough innovations take the dedication of resources to find and link ideas together. But the process does not require a huge investment of time and resources. It takes “innovation audits” involving a handful of people with visibility or relationships across major externally and internally facing parts of the organization. Some businesses may have a formal innovation pipeline infrastructure to leverage. But in most cases, the innovation audit team will have to leverage its collective network to uncover inventories of ideas and concepts that have been discarded, for whatever reason.
 
Innovation audits involve a process that can be scaled small, focusing on a specific region, function, or P&L -- or can be broadened to uncover big, enterprise-wide initiatives that can create positive disruption in your industry. Here’s a brief framework:
 
Find and explore your idea “archives”

How companies generate and archive ideas can vary. Those with a more mature innovation system may have a robust pipeline of concepts bucketed by P&L, brand, or region. Others find ideas buried in sales, marketing, R&D and sometimes HR. The first step is to find inventories of ideas in whatever form. P&L and marketing leaders are usually a good place to start, as they are typically the budget owners and de facto historians of a product or brand’s evolution.
 
Study ideas, look for patterns

Once you have collected your inventory of ideas, apply several different filters to identify the most powerful clusters. For starters, look for similarities across the following:

· Target – groups of ideas that will surprise and delight a common audience segment.
· Occasions – day parts, touchpoints, or other points in time that can be owned or shaped by a common set of ideas.
· Asset – technologies, intellectual property, infrastructure, and capabilities shared across the idea inventory.
· Trends – new developments in the industry, marketplace, or culture to build ideas on.
· Frame of reference – opportunities to play in a completely new space.
 
Experiment with your clusters, layering filters to help identify the richest veins. Make gut-level assessments of feasibility and business impact to rank their relative strength.

Regroup, reconsider

Continue to break down your clusters into sets of individual ideas that complement, support, or follow each other. Idea sets that can be deployed over time will provide more flexibility and resiliency. Ideally, you should have a mix of quick-win ideas and long-term plays that could deliver big returns over the long term.
 
Take a sports nutrition company with a new technology, “X Fuel,” that helps the body break down and use carbohydrates in food. A portfolio of product concepts would look like this:
 
· Existing Category – Existing Product  with X Fuel - for Current Consumer

· Existing Category – Existing Product  with X Fuel - for New Consumer

· Existing Category – New Product with X Fuel – for Current Consumer

· Existing Category – New Product with X Fuel – for New Consumer

· New Category – New Product with X Fuel – for Current Consumer

· New Category – New Product with X Fuel – for New Consumer

Planning and mapping

From here, you can begin to build out your business plan, prioritize development sequence, and inform the level of investment required to realize growth goals.

Using the X Fuel example, developing and deploying line extension-type ideas first will create opportunities to assess the appeal of the new benefit to a broad set of consumers with low risk. Confidence in the ability to create demand with a larger audience will lead to high investment/high impact product concepts in existing and new categories. The door opens for the company to build first mover advantage.
 
This process takes rigor, hard work, and creative thinking. But it ultimately will be more fruitful than starting from scratch -- and will lead to richer and more durable growth platforms over time.