Without the proper guidance to direct creative thinking, a mindset may turn from exciting to humdrum for many companies. But from where should a company start? How do you identify opportunities in your business with the highest prospect?
By identifying white space, your innovation endeavours get the ability to concentrate on the genuine untapped opportunity that goes with customer demands and organisational fit.
Analysing the competitive arena and finding your business whitespaces ascertains to focus and determines uniqueness in your offering, strengthening your brand.
What Is a White Space Opportunity in Business?
White space is the implied, unmet requirements of consumers that get explored to induce creation. It’s a market strategy to unveil fortunes, like new audiences and product advancements.
Most of the time, customers don’t know what they require until they learn about it, so it’s up to businesses to be farsighted and proactive. These white space opportunities enable companies to find unmet consumer needs.
It is a conducive strategy for comprehending how to deliver the most valuable results to the customers. But, because white space opportunities are not that easy to identify, it might be challenging to know where to begin.
Learn how to identify white space opportunities in your businesses step-by-step.
Begin with a Competitive Research
The foremost step to ascertaining whitespace in your market is to execute the competitive analysis. Start by identifying your top 5-10 competitors and then do a deep-dive examination of each.
Construct a matrix and look for not only the brand identity and organisations each competitor owns in the market but also look for trends and commonalities across the market arena.
When studying these competitor creations, analyse them with these views in mind-
- Audiences they are targeting (old, new.)
- Their objectives and needs they want to fulfil.
- Reviews of their customers.
Other than the competitors, note any new entrants that may disrupt your company overall and leading-edge organisations in similar industries.
Innovate upon Your Company and Products
Look upon analysing where, in your products, you can find white space. Ask yourself where consumer needs are and are unmet. For instance, if your blog team finds an issue with high interest from your readers but hasn’t written about it yet, that’s white space. Afterwards, decide your innovation strategy, whether you will write a series of blogs on that topic or an ebook.
If your company finds difficulty in identifying white space, revisit your business plan. You may discover the strategy you require to get back on the path.
White space can strengthen your company’s branding strategy. You may struggle to find where your products fit in the market. If you find a spot for innovation, you can use that to strengthen how your company gets seen by others.
Once you find what attracts customers to your company, you’ll be able to keep delighting your clients, growing your company, and changing the industry.
Communicate with Customer
Credit a human-centred innovation approach, engaging in lives and discovering unmet or under-met requirements of customers.
To uncover more holistically, you need to be ready to do more than simply asking, but also-
- Observe- practices, body language, working patterns
- Study- surroundings and environment of consumers
- Empathise- comprehend their motivations and emotions
Permit space in your innovation to thoroughly understand consumers’ lifestyles and experiences within and outside your group to determine pain points and trends that could bring new needs and opportunities to deliver unique benefits.
Work on the White Space Opportunities
With knowledge of customer needs and the competitive arena, map the delivery of requirements relative to the competitive set. Determine which demands get fulfilled completely, which are under-met, and which are unmet by competition to identify where the highest white space opportunity prevails.
From there, cross-connect under-met and unmet needs relative to broader market size, strength, and trends in requirements to direct your innovation focus. Make sure opportunities correspond with brand equity.
Take the time to study your competition carefully to uncover what is missing.
Analyse your audience to serve your customers better with a unique offering. The result can be new, noteworthy, accelerated income growth.
Conclusion
White space examination is a method that enables you to look at the competitive landscape up and down the value chain with a fresh lens. It helps discover opportunities that are not obvious, and it can recognise new spaces untouched by competitors. It can also be assumed part of what was deemed a remote, varied industry or outside the company.
Several white spaces might have a slight patenting activity, and some might not even have any patenting activity. PATHtoIP® services provide you with viable solutions for all your creation roadmap decisions.
PATHtoIP® goes into deep on patent mining combined with statistical analysis and will help you to identify the technology Gap/opportunity or White space in a Particular technology area. PATHtoIP® reports the patent landscape to describe patent situations for a specific technology of interest to our clients in a given country.
Our professionals at PATHtoIP® help you with strategic research planning and technology transfer, freedom to operate issues, identify white space or gaps in technology and identify licensing or out-licensing opportunities as part of a more comprehensive market analysis.