When identifying and defining opportunities, the organization should take as inputs what it understands of itself and its context, the innovation intent, the scope of the initiative, and what was learned in earlier initiatives. It should then gather insight and knowledge about needs and expectations, stated and unstated; gather insight about relevant trends and challenges, for example in competitors, technologies, intellectual property and markets; pin down opportunities, or areas of opportunity, and describe them as the impact sought, the value that could be realized, or as problem statements; and rank the opportunities. Knowledge gathering can look at what users, customers, citizens and others, current or potential, stand to lose or gain; tools include basic research, scanning, prospective analysis, benchmarking, searches, interviews, focus groups, ethnography, foresight, crowdsourcing, user scenarios, risk analysis and dynamic system models. Outputs: an understanding of the potential value and other effects; ranked problem statements, opportunities or areas of opportunity, each identified and defined; and an understanding of the state of the art, IP rights included.
The graph holds this control, the 0 it maps to, and the evidence behind each claim, over MCP and REST.