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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS116

SCAMPER product and service development list A memorable

variant on Osborn’s theme is Eberle’s SCAMPER checklist, an acronym for:

Substitute
Combine
Adapt
Magnify (or minify)
Put to other uses
Eliminate (or elaborate)
Rearrange (or reverse)

The approach to using SCAMPER is clearly similar to that required for
the Davis list.88

the big four industry-level checklist An even more focused list is

suggested by Harvard Business Review authors W. Chan Kim and Reneé
Mauborgne. Writing in relation to the value curve concept which inspired
the boundary-hopping technique described in Chapter 3, they propose that
attention should be focused at the industry level on just four questions:89

1 What factors could be reduced well below the industry standard?
2 What factors could be eliminated which the industry has taken for

granted?
3 What factors could be created which the industry has never offered?
4 What factors could be raised well above the industry standard?

We saw in Chapter 3 how Intuit answered these four big questions in the
market for personal finance software with its mould-breaking Quicken
product. By eliminating all unnecessary accounting functionality and
jargon which the market had previously taken for granted, the software
retailed at a price reduced well below the industry standard.

The big four technique’s strength lies in the provocative extremes of its
focused questions which force you to challenge conventional industry
thinking head-on.