Abstract:

Innovation is being increasingly recognized as a key factor in the growth of enterprises. Opportunity implementation phase of innovation has been studied extensively but there is a gap in understanding the opportunity identification stage of innovation. This stage has become critical since seeding of innovation takes place during this stage. Opportunity identification is a creative phase which requires design thinking and approach. A conceptual framework to identify a diverse range of opportunities would be of considerable importance to organisations.

Focus on scope of the research study has been to identify opportunities in an open innovation framework in which industries and design academic institutions collaborate. Since the objective was to study current phenomena, multiple case study method was considered to be an appropriate method for inquiry.

This involved preparing original case studies through academic-industry collaboration and writing the case studies for step by step analysis. It included initial coding, categorization, single case study analysis, cross case study analysis and multiple case study analysis to replicate the findings.

The resultant conceptual framework proposed includes the project context, six factors including push and pull factors, design approaches including creative thinking, multiple perspective and non linear approach; and various opportunities including product, process and system level opportunities as well as opportunity elaboration.This framework is expected to help in arriving at a range of diverse opportunities by providing an exploratory, creative approach rather than a linear predictable one towards innovation.