Tips & tricks for using megatrends for strategic innovation #3/5: 'map the trends'

The most important part of the whole megatrend exercise is to draw valuable conclusions from it. Throughout the exercise you will have gathered tons of opinions and insights, but how do you make sense of all these?

You could write a lengthy report or presentation with all the valuable facts and conclusions, each developed through multiple angles and argumentations. Chances are that your stakeholders will be happy with all this information. They might even find the time to read it. Just before they put the report on their shelves, only to be retrieved at the next desk cleaning effort.

Better is to visualize the insights. And there’s no better way to visualize things, but to segment them.

You could for instance segment trends based on the impact they have on your company (Y-axis) and whether they have developed already, are doing so now or will do somewhere in the future (X-axis). This gives you a good idea on which trends you need to act on urgently:

A more sophisticated way would be to assess whether your company has any influence on the trends or on their consequences (Y axis) and whether they relate to your core business or not (X-axis). While the trends in the top-right box require immediate action, it is the trends in the top left box (‘influence’) that will be the most crucial for you from a competitive and innovation perspective. Think about it for a moment... And if you still don’t know why drop me a mail.

Another good way to visualize conclusions are heat maps. Say you list all the major customer segments you serve (rows) against major megatrends (columns). By coloring based on whether these segments are being threatened or can benefit from these trends, you obtain a valuable overview of the major challenges and opportunities your customers (and hence, indirectly, your business) are facing.

If you need to communicate just one thing from the whole megatrend exercise, it would be these type of graphics. Print them, put them on the walls in the offices of your stakeholders, on the landing page of your intranet, whatever. But make sure people think about these conclusions. 


Click if you missed the previous tips & tricks #1 'Look beyond the obvious' #2 'Discuss internally'