Value Creation through Shaping Opportunity - The Business Model (Chapter 10 from Disrupt Together)

To successfully innovate, you must bridge the gulf between back-of-the-napkin sketches and business success. It's called "opportunity shaping": taking your ideas from theoretical greatness to real value delivery and capture. Now, learn how to successfully shape your opportunities – and how to integrate opportunity shaping into a complete innovation framework that works.

Value Creation through Shaping Opportunity - The Business Model is part of Philadelphia University's breakthrough approach to innovation: one that links business, design and engineering, and delivers extraordinary results in both new and existing ventures. First, Dr. Stephen Spinelli and Heather McGowan introduce this "Disrupt Together" approach, explain its deep roots in design thinking, and show how it generates far more high-value ideas for innovation. Next, D. R. Widder drills down to focus specifically on the crucial opportunity shaping tasks that must be performed well in order to successfully execute on your new product, service, or venture.

Widder shows how to forge and reshape your idea as it contacts more of the real-world environment, reflecting feedback from customers, advisors, suppliers, stakeholders, and the competitive and macroeconomic environment. You'll learn how to use continual feedback to refine and retool… gain objectivity and highlight weak spots… systematically strengthen your idea as is moves towards the marketplace.

Value Creation through Shaping Opportunity - The Business Model is one of 15 e-chapters addressing all facets of innovation, from design processes and team development to business models and value delivery. Each is crafted by a pioneering business innovator – and they all integrate into today's most coherent, realistic blueprint for innovation. For all entrepreneurs, executives, managers, strategists, and students who want to drive more value from innovation.

D. R. Widder, Vice President of Innovation at Philadelphia University, is a catalyst for innovation in areas such as entrepreneurship, online learning, analytics, and partnership development. His 20-year career in industry has included multiple high-tech ventures and patents spanning artificial intelligence, medical imaging, and sustainable products, as well as an entrepreneur-in-residence role at IBM. D. R. is on the executive committee of the early-stage venture investment and advisory group RVI. He holds an M.S. degree in Engineering with a focus on Applied Mathematics, and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from Babson College.