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873 : STEP ONE – SEEKING AND SHAPING OPPORTUNITIES

also demystifying the massively complex and opaque charging
structures operated by the telephone networks. Rather than accept the
conventional boundary represented solely by the product, Dunstone
pushed back the boundary so that it included the product’s subsequent
economical use.

IKEA redefined the boundary of its flat-pack furniture offering in order
to penetrate the Japanese market – the boundary was extended to
include an assembly service. As we saw above, this boundary
redefinition found a recent echo in the UK, where Marks & Spencer
invested significant funds in user-friendly instruction manuals to
accompany the launch of a flat-pack furniture range – it extended the
boundary beyond the raw disassembled product to include its
subsequent easy assembly.

boundaries can keep good ideas out Defining an opportunity
necessarily puts boundaries on it. The opportunity’s boundary is the
notional ‘container’ which separates highly relevant features inside
the boundary from apparently less relevant ones outside the
boundary.

Just as with core users, your first definition of the market opportunity
is likely to reflect your own assumptions, preconceptions and
concerns, and quite possibly those of others. This means that
potentially productive areas to explore may remain hidden in the
background.

The following simple four-step method is very effective for bringing
potentially relevant aspects back into awareness by examining each
element of the problem definition for its hidden assumptions.

step one: write down an initial statement of the opportunity Imagine
that you are Steve Millar, managing director of BRL Hardy, the
Australian wine company which in the early 1990s was exporting
$31 million sales, predominantly in bulk for the own-label ranges of
retailers such as Sainsbury’s. Such own-label activity capitalised on
consumers’ confusion in the face of a tantalising choice of
appellations contrôlées, regions, grape varieties, vintages and so
on.

Anxious to grow the overseas business, you might define the initial
opportunity as: ‘How to increase the sales through overseas branded
retail of our Australian wine?’