Your market’s white space is a gold mine of opportunity for innovation. It’s the place where unmet needs, underserved markets and undiscovered landscapes live and breathe. This unchartered territory is primed for exploration if your organization is willing to stretch beyond your core competencies and what you know.
Just being willing to go outside your comfort zone, however, is not enough. You’ll need to be able to act on your findings and craft a plan for execution. Done well, it’s called strategic innovation. This process is deliberate and easily replicated, producing a meaningful difference in the value you deliver to consumers, customers, partners and your brand.
Since sustainability is where it’s at, being a value driver in this area offers tremendous opportunities. Wondering how your business can make the most of this opportunity? The following five tips will help you discover and leverage your market’s white space:
Understand where your market is going. You’ll need to stay on top of emerging trends in your market. You have to know what the landscape is, whether you can meet the demands of the new landscape by bridging whatever gap exists and how you need to evolve. Conduct research to find these answers. Also, design your plan with the end in mind. Keeping sustainability in mind, identify which green building features or combination of features impact human health, productivity and organizational success the most.
Bake in the customer. Plans for innovation work best when inspired by consumers. Be sure to fully integrate them in unique ways. Explore behavior and needs of current and potential customers/consumers. Consider ethnographic research versus just traditional focus groups. Get them involved in the innovation process as well as the strategy development. Although folding them into strategy may be uncomfortable for some, if they become true partners in the process, you’re apt to produce more breakthrough insights.
Form strategic partnerships. Align yourself with key players who can help further your innovation project. Internal and external stakeholders must be folded in here to develop a shared vision and move forward with it together. This means key members of senior leadership along with those outside the organization, which could include contractors, green building professionals and local officials who can relay project needs. This collaboration fosters ownership, commitment and secures foundation for successful implementation.
Get visionary with it. Don’t be afraid to break out of the box and think revolutionary, but don’t discard traditional approaches to business strategy all together. Explore areas outside of your traditional business segment and consider segments that are non-adjacent to yours (intersecting green technology with wearable tech, for example). Marry these two approaches so it’s an innovation process that’s structured. Connections that are less obvious can spark outside-the-box thinking. Just make sure they’re realistic approaches that can actually be implemented.
Be ready. Determine how prepared your organization is to take action, put new ideas and strategies into play, and successfully manage the demands (operational, cultural, financial, etc.) that accompany this. Make sure to identify your organization’s key competencies and technologies, and assess which of these assets can be leveraged to deliver customer value.
Adopting this framework in your organization will make the business impact evident, differentiate your brand and create the building blocks for sustainable and strategic innovation.
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Lori Malone, founder and CEO of brand design and marketing firm Category5 based in Tulsa, Okla., is a champion of green building and a LEED Green Associate. To learn more about emerging trends in the building products industry that may help you discover your white space opportunity, download the Category5 Complete Trend Report at www.category5-inc.com/digital-downloads. Use discount code METALARCH at checkout.*
*Free for Metal Architecture readers for a limited time through May 31, 2015.