What Is Asset Mining?
We firmly believe that every business, no matter how big or small, is sitting on riches or ‘assets’ that are frequently lying dormant or underused. Before we commission research or develop new ideas, we spend time with all our clients up-front using a process called ‘Asset Mining’. The assets that we find most helpful from an innovation perspective, are frequently knowledge-based assets, and most often, relate to the target audience, the product(s) or incoming market and competitor trends.
Why Are Knowledge-Based Assets Frequently Underused?
By its very definition, innovation tends to be forward-facing, seeking new ideas and opportunities, and very rarely looks in the rear-view mirror. This mind-set coupled with time scarcity, and now remotely working teams, means that the majority of tacit knowledge and experiences can remain untapped. Unlike physical assets that depreciate with time, knowledge often retains its value, but accessing it in an actionable way can be problematic. At Untapped, we use a series of specific stimulus questions, intentionally designed to unlock the team’s tacit knowledge and experience.
Why Mine For Assets?
1. Return-On-Past-Investment
Tacit knowledge is usually the result of prior money that has been already spent e.g. through past research, past development work or past product launches. By mining the assets from historical work we are making your prior budget work even harder for you.
2. Return-On-Future-Investment
Mining the assets from historical work identifies what we already know, which means we can now identify what we don’t yet know. This allows us to focus future research and development work and budget on filling in the knowledge gaps – and not learning the same thing again and again.
3. Return-On-People-Investment
We frequently hear from our clients that they really enjoy our asset mining process and the stimulus question sessions. The time set aside to dig deep, with a questioning approach allows them to access past thoughts and ideas which hugely contribute to subsequent project success. Clients tell us that asset mining frequently ‘smoothens the way’ for their project and can make the project objectives stick better in the organisation as the team can easily trace back and see their influence on the insights and resulting ideas.
What Do You Do With The Assets Once You Find Them?
Once the assets are identified they can be translated into insight statements related to:
- The target audience,
- The product(s), and
- Incoming market and competitor trends.
We then combine these insight statements in different combinations and permutations to highlight new ‘opportunity spaces’ for big, new idea development.
