Managing Corporate Culture, Innovation, and Intrapreneurship

In this chapter we describe the Idea Generation stage of the Corporate Venturing Process. The Idea Generation stage is the first stage of the Concept Development phase. The purpose of this stage is to generate a large number of new product ideas that will be evaluated in the next stage of Concept Evaluation.

We discuss the generation of new product ideas through both search and creative synthesis procedures. To enable an effective search for new product ideas, we will first identify the best sources and then describe the optimum procedures for searching. We will also investigate generating new product ideas through creative synthesis, using general, need-based, and technology-based techniques.

A product concept defines the core benefit and the major supporting benefits of a new product and describes how these benefits are provided. It can be a verbal or written description, an artist's rendering, or a model or appear in another suitable presentation format that depicts the idea. The concept must be defined specifically enough that it can be evaluated by interested parties: highlevel management, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and particularly prospective customers.

An idea does not have to be nearly as complete or as specific as a concept. An idea is usually represented as a descriptive statement, written or spoken. In the Idea Generation stage we are more interested in generating the maximum number of ideas than concerned with the form in which the idea is stated. The

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