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713 : STEP ONE – SEEKING AND SHAPING OPPORTUNITIES

insights which you are not yet ready to perceive. This means that you
should never discard or screen out information or ideas because they do
not immediately appear useful.

If you doubt this, be heartened by the story of penicillin. As Alexander
Fleming acknowledged at the time of winning the Nobel prize for
medicine in 1945: ‘Nature makes penicillin. I just discovered it.’ The
reality is more complex than that. It is true that Fleming discovered
penicillin in 1929 by accident, when a forgotten culture plate
developed a large growth of green mould. Observing that a host of dead
microbes lay between the mould and the clumps of yellow bacteria,
Fleming deduced that something emanating from the mould had killed
the bacteria. He named his discovery penicillin but concluded that it
offered little opportunity for applied use. He published an academic
paper about its laboratory properties and then moved on.

It was a full ten years later, however, before a team of Oxford scientists
recognised the opportunities represented by Fleming’s discovery and
with great difficulty produced sufficient penicillin to conduct the trials
which established it as the miracle drug of the 20th century.53

reworking the facts As you collect your various facts and

figures, it is important not just to file them away as static
representations of a given market but continually to challenge the facts
for other avenues to pursue and for other insights to develop. You must
keep reviewing the data during the entire idea development process –
market data is itself dynamic; new data may emerge which challenges
the accuracy of earlier analysis; and data whose potential you initially
could not perceive may suddenly offer rich pickings.

The existing management and marketing literature gives wide coverage to
the conventional SWOT technique. SWOT analyses a company’s internal
strengths and weaknesses relative to the competition and identifies the
opportunities and threats which lie outside an organisation’s direct
control. SWOT provides an effective tool for starting to structure the data.
By the same token, undertaking an audit of the external environment
under the headings of political, economic, social and technological
change – the well-known PEST analysis – provides a useful additional
feed for the opportunities and threats sections.

While populating your PEST and SWOT analyses, you must keep
asking yourself how you can transform threats into opportunities or