Strategy & Leadership

Purpose – The paper aims to examine how to devise ways to capture data in and around the marketplace that generates indicators of emerging and potential marketplace change which could lead to breakthrough customer offerings and how to do so long before the opportunities are manifestly visible.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes a new methodology, the Value Opportunity Web (VOW), a process for collecting insights about the external environment and transforming and leveraging them into winning customer offerings. These data come from unique communities of individuals “close to the action” who can anticipate, for example, how a set of technologies might someday intersect.

Findings – The paper shows cases where companies have used VOWs to identify unique data sources, have created sets of technological mechanisms or “platforms” to capture the relevant data and have managed these communities successfully.

Research limitations/implications – The authors are leading consultants with access to cutting edge information gathering programs, which they have disguised for this article.

Practical implications – The VOW has a critical strategic purpose: to extract breakthrough opportunities from an ever-burgeoning world of external data by learning from a community of talented recruits, each an expert in one or more fields. Companies are learning to use VOWs to quickly understand change and to test breakthrough ideas as they emerge.

Originality/value – The ultimate purpose of a VOW is not data gathering but reflection and analysis, with the goal of identifying and developing new ways to deliver customer value.