The Time is Now!

The time is now!
By Roger La Salle

Years end – or Years start?
For many businesses the year has ended flat, to say the least. The stock market is flat and confidence is low. Now is the time to be different, time to take advantage of those that view the glass half empty, it’s time to seize the opportunities that many are overlooking as they struggle to rise from the doldrums.

“Opportunity Capture” is the new wave. Opportunity precedes innovation and innovation is what powers business.

This is powerful stuff
The opportunity matrix asks us to look at the big picture by observing human and business activities. There are only five activities we need to observe, these are called the Seeds of Opportunity.

Observation is the key and for this reason we define opportunity as “An observed fortunate set of circumstances”. If you use the Seeds identified as the search methodology you will see opportunity abound.

Some stunning insights and solutions
A quick scan using the opportunity matrix has revealed:

• Worldwide there are approximately 6 million megawatt hours of power used annually to charge mobile phones (Energy consumption we did not even consider some 15 years ago)
o Solution – provide everybody with a $2.00 solar cell with a new phone

• We all love out text messages, (most of which are frivolous) and yet whilst many worry about green initiatives there are close to 100 MWatt hours of power used annually in sending these texts
o Limit texts to what is needed, not what is fun – Twitter may be one answer, but by no means the best!

• In Istanbul alone (just one major world city) approximately 200 MWatt hours of electricity are used every morning just on car stop lights. Double that to add the afternoon peak.
o Use LEDS to reduce this by a factor of 10, flashing the lights at a 50% duty cycle halves it again.

• In Australia alone we use approximately 440 tonnes of staples annually just to staple credit card invoices to receipts and 730,000 km of paper just to print the receipts.
o Put it all in the cloud as an e-receipt

• In Australia alone close to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 is realised annually from Coca Cola
o Drink low fizz drinks or use the “Fizz Straw” to aerate the drink as you drink it

• There are approximately 500,000 dinner parties in Melbourne every week
o Use this knowledge to access the complementary products market

• There are approximately 80 million toothbrushes sold annually in Australia
o Make the package easier to open and steal your competitors market

• A bank has millions of customers, their “channel” – but they never leverage it?
o Fulfil a common need of your “tribe”

What Now
The above are just some of the stunning insights that Opportunity Capture can reveal, and it takes just seconds.

You too can do this and be first to see the opportunities that others are simply missing, it’s fast, simple and rigorous.

**** END ****

Roger La Salle, is the creator of the “Matrix Thinking”™ technique and is widely sought after as an international speaker on Innovation, Opportunity and business development. He is the author of four books, Director and former CEO of the Innovation Centre of Victoria (INNOVIC) as well as a number of companies both in Australian and overseas. He has been responsible for a number of successful technology start-ups and in 2004 was a regular panelist on the ABC New Inventors TV program. In 2005 he was appointed to the “Chair of Innovation” at “The Queens University” in Belfast. Matrix Thinking is now used in more than 26 countries and licensed to Deloitte, one of the world’s largest consulting firms. www.matrixthinking.com

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One Response to “The Time is Now!”

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