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833 : STEP ONE – SEEKING AND SHAPING OPPORTUNITIES

world’s best-selling boot, worn by the likes of David Beckham and
Zinedine Zidane. Johnston was also a runner-up of the Design Museum
Designer of the Year 2004 competition for the design of his latest boot, The
Pig, which resulted from ten years of research and more than 1,000
prototypes.63

moving the hookah from café to home One of the more unusual UK
winners of the Queen’s Award for International Trade in 2004 was
Swift-Lite Charcoal of East Sussex. The company was established to sell
charcoal to tandoori restaurants and then extended to making charcoal
tablets for use in burning incense. During his sales promotion trips to
the Middle East, Steve Barnes, the managing director, observed that
consumers were also using the product for smoking hookah pipes. Cafés
had always represented the traditional venue for the pastime of
smoking hookah pipes, by virtue of providing a permanent source of
heat to keep the pipes alight. Swift-Lite’s charcoal tablets allowed
individuals to smoke at home and in hotels rather than just in cafés.

From the 20,000 boxes of charcoal tablets produced in the company’s
first year, annual sales of boxes have expanded to 1.2 million, of which
75 per cent are exported.64

step two: identifying parallel and ‘extreme’ markets The second
step in the lead-user process involves the creative identification of
markets which face similar problems in more extreme or sophisticated
forms and have solved them. Your task is then to identify what lessons
you can learn from these parallel markets and apply to your own
business idea.

Suppose we take the UK pre-university examination market system to
illustrate the second step. In Chapter 2, we described how the average US
student sits an average of 2,600 examinations during an academic lifetime.
In the UK, a similar phenomenon generates some 25 million handwritten
scripts each year which are distributed by mail to external examiners. It
only takes a (statistically insignificant) handful of exam scripts to be
delayed or lost in the post for individual academic careers to be blighted
and for a PR disaster to be whipped up in the media for the examination
board concerned.

the right questions for an examination board to ask In this market,
step two of the lead-user process would prompt examination boards to
explore the document transmission and tracking systems deployed in