Where should we look for innovation opportunities?

An innovation search field is a deliberately chosen area in which to look for worthwhile problems and possible responses. It connects a business ambition with a particular customer situation, capability or change in the environment. It is broader than a project, but narrower than “find new growth.” A useful field gives people room to explore while explaining why that exploration belongs here.

Imagine a small bicycle-repair business that wants to become more useful to people who depend on their bikes for everyday travel. The owner has proposals for a booking app, a mobile workshop and a premium accessories range. Choosing the most exciting proposal would skip an earlier question: which situations are worth investigating? This business and the examples throughout this article are fictional.

Put the strategic question on the table

Start by stating what the business wants to improve and what it cannot casually put at risk. In our example, the ambition is to reduce the disruption customers face when a working bicycle becomes unavailable. The existing workshop must remain dependable, and the team cannot staff a second permanent location. Those statements establish a direction and two real constraints.

Do not confuse an ambition with a predetermined answer. “Increase app bookings” already privileges one channel. “Make maintenance easier to arrange around working hours” leaves open changes to appointments, collection, communication and service design. If every promising answer must contain the same technology, ask whether you are defining a search field or just defending a project.

The Design Council’s Double Diamond distinguishes discovering and defining a challenge from developing responses. Search fields help set the boundary for that inquiry; they are not a substitute for it. A field remains provisional until the team has investigated the situations it contains.

Bring together three kinds of evidence

Before commissioning new interviews, use desk research to check what existing reports and records can establish. Keep a note of their origin, date and fit with the service decision; an attractive trend summary is not evidence about this particular customer situation.

First, examine customers’ actual difficulties. Review recent enquiries, missed appointments, complaints and workarounds. Talk with people who stopped using the service as well as those who remain enthusiastic. A customer who borrows a neighbour’s bike during repairs may reveal a different problem from someone who simply wants a lower price.

Second, examine what the business can credibly do. List skills, relationships, access and operating knowledge, not just assets. A workshop’s useful capability might be diagnosing common faults quickly, not owning a particular machine. Check whether the capability is available for additional work or already fully committed.

Third, look outside the business. What could alter the situation over the relevant period? The Government Office for Science’s Futures Toolkit connects scanning and driver analysis with exploring future possibilities. Use that connection to raise questions, not to treat an interesting trend as a proven opportunity.

For the bicycle shop, an observed increase in requests for workplace collection would warrant investigation. It would not establish that a profitable collection service exists. Record the observation, its source and competing explanations. Perhaps one employer circulated the shop’s number; perhaps opening hours changed elsewhere. The distinction matters before committing scarce mechanics.

Write fields around situations and benefits

A practical field statement identifies a group, a situation and a desired improvement without prescribing a complete solution. “Keeping everyday cyclists mobile during repairs” is more useful than “mobility innovation.” It is also broader than “buy six courtesy bikes,” which is already one possible response.

Try drafting several fields independently before discussing them together. Ask a mechanic, a customer-facing colleague and the owner to each propose two. Compare the boundaries rather than counting votes. Where do their fields overlap? Which important situation is absent? Which statement merely renames a current project?

Clive Kerr’s opportunity exploration map brings together applications, resources, barriers and decision points. That is a useful reminder to connect an attractive opportunity with its practical conditions. The format below is an original working brief, not a reproduction of that template or a validated scoring system.

A worked set of three search fields

For our fictional shop, the team selects three fields to investigate. They share the ambition of dependable everyday cycling but focus attention on different circumstances.

Search field	Why investigate it?	What remains open?	Deliberate exclusion
Maintenance around working hours	Customers describe difficulty arranging drop-off and collection	Appointment design, collection partners, opening patterns	Building an app before understanding the timing problem
Mobility while a bike is unavailable	Some customers depend on their bike for essential journeys	Repair turnaround, temporary alternatives, better diagnosis	A general-purpose bike-rental business
Fewer avoidable repeat visits	Staff see jobs delayed by missing information or parts	Intake questions, parts preparation, remote checks	Stocking every possible component

Each row contains a question the business can investigate. None guarantees demand, feasibility or a good financial outcome. The exclusions are especially important: they prevent the team from turning a focused inquiry into a collection of adjacent ambitions.

The premium accessories range sits outside this round. That does not mean accessories are inherently uninnovative or commercially unattractive. It means the proposal has a weaker connection with this particular ambition and competes for attention the team has chosen to use elsewhere. Record that reasoning so a future discussion does not begin from scratch.

Choose a manageable investigation portfolio

Do not launch every field merely because each has a reasonable case. Estimate what learning would require: customer access, staff time, information, specialist input and decision authority. The bottleneck may be the owner who approves changes, not the money available for interviews.

For each field, propose the smallest responsible investigation that could change a decision. For maintenance around working hours, that might mean reconstructing recent repair journeys with customers and comparing them with intake patterns. For repeat visits, it could mean following several repair jobs from first contact to collection and documenting where information disappears.

GOV.UK’s discovery guidance treats understanding the problem and deciding whether further work is worthwhile as legitimate outputs. Applied to this business, the first commitment is to learn, not to promise a new service. A field can close because the problem is uncommon, already adequately solved or beyond the business’s useful reach.

Use a short review note containing the field, evidence available, uncertainty, proposed investigation, owner and next decision date. Avoid a precise-looking total score built from subjective numbers. A weak evidence base does not become strong because it has been averaged across five criteria.

Give people freedom within a clear boundary

A search field should not become a quiet instruction to produce the sponsor’s preferred answer. Invite alternatives that solve the same situation differently. A collection partnership, a changed intake routine and a faster diagnosis service might all belong in one field even though only one involves new software.

Equally, explain how people can challenge the boundary. If interviews show that uncertainty about repair cost matters more than opening hours, the team should be able to revise the field. Record what changed and why. Otherwise “strategic focus” can become a reason to ignore inconvenient learning.

Once a field is credible, move into customer interviews and concept development. Keep the original problem visible beside emerging ideas. It helps prevent a plausible concept from gradually replacing the reason for investigating it.

Review the fields, not just the projects

At a review, ask whether the field still matters, whether the evidence has improved and whether the team can act on what it is learning. A busy field can still be strategically weak. Ten concepts do not compensate for an unclear customer situation.

Look for concentration as well. If all three fields depend on the same mechanic or supplier, they are not independent commitments. If every field concerns current customers, consider whether that is a deliberate choice or simply a consequence of easy access. Connect these questions with the wider innovation strategy.

The limitations are straightforward. Search fields reflect judgement, available evidence and the voices included in the discussion. They can overlook unfamiliar markets and reinforce existing strengths too comfortably. This workflow helps make those choices explicit; it does not calculate the best opportunity.

Finish with a small set of named inquiries, an honest account of exclusions and a scheduled decision. The result should make it easier for a colleague to say, “This is worth exploring, and here is why it belongs in our work.”