HOW TO CREATE COMPELLING CASES

Once you have analyzed the opportunity's feasibility, it's time to create a compelling case so the decision-makers can evaluate and buy the idea. In the previous stage, we made the first evaluation of the opportunities to make sure that they align with the company's strategic objective and measure the ones that have the most significant return potential.

We also talked to other business areas to investigate real possibilities and start gaining these teams' engagement in the potential opportunity.

Still, these opportunities are not ready to be presented to the company's decision-makers. At this stage, it is very likely that you are not yet prepared to answer your questions properly, and this may put you to lose all the work conducted so far.

In this chapter, I'll show you how you can delve into relevant topics of an opportunity to create an objective material that can be presented to decision-makers without leaving many questions about its feasibility.

I need to warn you that the opportunity may prove less stable during the development of the topics than it seemed. If this happens at this stage, be careful to go back and remove the idea from the company pipeline while you can do so without causing any loss.

To build a compelling case, we will use a sequence of frameworks that will produce enough evidence to move forward or, if applicable, give up taking the idea to the company board.

To prepare this material, the innovation team should schedule meetings with other business areas to discuss the opportunity and raise issues. It is also your function to go beyond the startup's website. The team should schedule meetings with startups, request demos, request a product deck (product presentation to run internally in the company), replicate questions from business areas, and ask questions.

This process may seem laborious, but believe me, it will save time in the future by already addressing engagement with business areas and improving your reputation with the company's decision-makers. Just out of curiosity, my record at this stage was a month to work ten opportunities for a multinational steel company. I achieved this using the Innovation Intelligence platform to capture trends, find startups and update the frameworks mentioned above.