IdeaPAD: How do you identify high-impact innovations for an existing product?

Introduction

Data is only as valuable as the insights it yields. Our client, a powerhouse in the entertainment sector, sat on a wealth of proprietary data that was performing well, but not at its full potential. They didn't just need a consultant. They needed a bridge between raw information and untapped revenue.

PixelEdge stepped in to provide a structured discovery framework, turning underutilized research into a strategic engine for market growth.

Solution: The IdeaPAD

The client had deep experience in their industry, but they knew they wanted some outside guidance on ideation for their data aggregation tool. To find ideas that would get off the ground, they needed to first establish a solid launchpad.

Paul Silva created the IdeaPAD during years of working with students and companies in innovation and entrepreneurship. The IdeaPAD helps a team identify potential ideas based on its goals, resources, and market, all with only a single page of prompts in a day or less. The prompts then lead to a brainstorming session for team members, and a scoring system allows the best potential ideas to come together. Previous companies using the IdeaPAD scaled their product by 10x or became leaders in their space.

1. Create a team

The IdeaPAD works best with a good mix of team representatives from two categories:

1. Leaders who can allocate resources

2. Team members with current experience in the field

   
   

Bring together all team members to work through the IdeaPAD prompts with a neutral facilitator.

2. Build the PAD

The PAD (“launchpad”) allows you to come up with a firm foundation for the ideas you’ll brainstorm later. It covers what you are hoping to achieve (the Purpose), what you already have that can help (the Assets), and whether there is already evidence that there is a need in your market (the Demand).

The facilitator works through the prompts with the team to build the PAD, as outlined in the table below.

3. Identify and score the ideas

After your team really understands its PAD, it’s time to brainstorm ideas, score them, and decide which ideas are the best candidates for launch.

Activating the Strategy: A Real-World Transformation

After refining our structured approach to data innovation, we put it into practice with our client in the entertainment sector. The goal was to take their existing research tool from the sidelines to the spotlight. By bringing together a powerhouse team of decision-makers and data experts, PixelEdge facilitated a pivot from 'untapped potential' to 'market-ready execution.

PAD

Purpose: Why innovate?

The company representatives knew that they had amassed the best data in the business and wanted to tap its potential. Without a clear objective, however, it is difficult to succeed. Paul prompted them with questions about whether they wanted more revenue, subscribers, or visibility in their space.

The existing product already improved marketing and sales by raising their credibility in the entertainment sector. It also helped their operations team by providing strategic data directly to their clients. As it was originally envisioned as a marketing and sales tool, it was currently a cost center. While they have ambition for the product to grow to have a significant impact, the team leader smartly decided to go for iterative improvement and decided to focus on growing its revenue enough to cover its hard costs.

Once the team leader decided on that goal, they also defined their purpose to include the organization's objectives of marketing, sales, and operations.

Assets: What you’ve got on hand

From there, they looked at their assets and discovered that they are well positioned for growth based on their current market position in the industry. They have great internal resources and a large external network to work with.

In short, their superpower is their position and brand in their industry. They recognized that they are the top company of their kind in the world and that their team has personal relationships with the industry’s most important players. This potential superpower was being used in other parts of their company, so they realized they could apply it to an idea for this product to reach their revenue goals.

Demand: What the market wants

They then reviewed the demand:

• Current top offerings: Customers liked the information they provided on investment, mergers, and acquisitions, as well as a list of the top investors and acquirers.

• Stakeholders asking for: They wanted the data to be simplified in some areas but with the ability to have custom reports. They also wanted more market research and important announcements in the space.

• Competitors offer: Their competitors offered some key information in public company data, regional data, and additional investment information.

• Changes from external drivers: Their industry had experienced a wave of exponential growth that was now slowing down, and global economic and political issues affected the industry. Additionally, technology like AI was something their customers wanted to understand for their sector.

Identify and score ideas

Now that they had their PAD (and a lunch break), they were ready to start brainstorming ideas for what they could do next.

Criteria

Along with the default scoring criteria, which includes scoring against the Purpose, Assets, and Demand (PAD), they included the following additional criteria:

• Differentiator – Would customers view this as an essential or best-quality product?

• Feasible – Can this be done with existing people and budget?

Each criterion was weighted at either a 1 or 2, though any multiplier could be used. Since the company wanted to reach low-hanging fruit, they weighed the feasibility category at 2.

Score

The team members had a few minutes to secretly score each idea against the five criteria.

A facilitator first checked scores to see if some scored a 0 (lowest) versus others a 2 (highest). When someone’s idea scored poorly, there was a quick, respectful discussion, and then the idea was put to rest.

Some interesting discussions came out of the low-scoring results:

• The analysts wanted to sell data to colleges, but business leadership had experience in that market and knew it would be challenging. Once everyone understood the resources it would take, the idea ended up scoring the worst.

• Some scored partnering with market research firms highly, but others on the team explained that there were hurdles such as negotiation and compensation to be decided on. It didn’t leverage their current assets.

• The team had more historical data than any of their competition, but on review, there was no demand for that data.

And the discussions for the best-performing ideas were exciting:

• They helped their clients understand current trends and terms used in mergers and acquisitions but didn’t provide this data, which would be valuable to their clients.

• They provided one generic view of all their data, and the executives they targeted were only interested in particular information. Creating a dashboard for the executives could be an easy win.

• Similarly, they could create multiple views of the data for themes, particular sectors, geographic regions, and so on, which would also provide value with minimal investment.

• They had never formally marketed this product to the users of their other products, so that might also be a fruitful opportunity.

At the end, they had a visualization of ideas and could clearly see a few winners with total scores over 80 that made the most sense to the whole team. They were excited to see that the best ideas both built on their strengths and were reasonable to achieve.

The team lead selected two of the ideas, and were assigned next steps:

1. Create a KISS Canvas for each selected idea.

2. Use the Customer Discovery process to test out the hypotheses from their KISS Canvas:

3. Revisit your assumptions and “pivot, perish, or persist” as appropriate.

4. After you’ve started sending out prototypes, move on to Product-Market Fit.

Result

The client spent one day with PixelEdge to build their PAD foundation and develop ideas.

At the end of the workshop, they had clear objectives for moving forward with the best prospects, and they had already assigned team members to do the work. Best of all, they were excited by the opportunities to leverage their superpower and achieve their goals.

Acknowledgments

Paul Silva would like to give a huge thank you to:

• Stephen Brand for his original work that inspired this tool in the first place.

• Kelly Minton, co-founder of Paul Silva’s last startup, helped evolve this tool from its earlier iteration to something much more powerful.

• Liz Slavkovsky for clarifying the language and helping us communicate with you.

• Muhammad Awais Amjad for applying his design skills to make the IdeaPAD as attractive to look at as it is functional!