In many industries today--including aerospace, electronics, chemicals, software, global construction, global investment and commercial banking, and international manufacturing--even simple product or service innovations can become complicated, because so many companies now operate in ecosystems made up of powerful and highly interconnected stakeholders. That means you can't focus exclusively on the customer and yourself: You need value propositions that stakeholders in your ecosystem can also buy into, which vastly complicates the process of identifying innovation opportunities. The authors have developed a tool-based ideation process that a major pharmaceutical company has rolled out worldwide. They describe the six steps in the process: (1) Identify key stakeholders and their most pressing needs; (2) outline stakeholder consumption chains; (3) categorize features of the current offer and build offer profiles; (4) create growth opportunity profiles; (5) map stakeholder tensions; and (6) choose your best opportunity.

Big data is proving difficult to translate into useful knowledge, the authors write. That's in part because a company's knowledge assets involve so much more: core competencies, areas of expertise, intellectual property, and deep pools of talent. Large-scale, sustainable growth is generally made possible when people take insights from one knowledge domain and apply them in another--when deep technical expertise in one business unit is applied in a different business unit, for example, or when a best-in-class marketing group pulls a product development unit into the 21st century by sharing market insights gleaned from customer data. The authors describe how to map your organization's strategic knowledge and identify where it can help you create value and growth. When knowledge assets are placed in a grid along two dimensions--"unstructured" (tacit) versus "structured" (explicit) and "undiffused" (proprietary) versus "diffused" (shared)--it becomes easier to manage them for future competitive advantage.