Note: I feel like this tool *should* already exist, but I’ve not seen it anywhere… so I’m claiming at least independent invention!

When you’re generating and developing early-stage venture ideas it can be helpful to use provocations to ‘stretch’ and iterate those initial ideas into new possibilities. The first idea is usually too simple, too obvious, and often just wrong. However, it can still be a perfectly serviceable stepping-stone to better ones…

This tool helps:

• Identify variations and iterations of an idea that might be of greater value to enact or easier to start by narrowing the scope.
• Identify alternative routes to the same outcomes and alternative outcomes from the same approaches.

It also works as a way of positioning competitors and alternatives to your initial idea and then finding ways around them.

It looks like this:

Method: Work your way through the Provocations

Locate your existing idea for a venture in the middle of your working area and draw the axis on. Your initial idea might be best expressed in a variant form of the Strategyzer Ad-Lib: Our Product/Service helps Specified Audience to Achieve a Job/Status/Emotional State by How does it Work.

• Bigger Impact provocations:
  • A variant that impacts x10 people
  • A variant that makes x10 the difference to its users or beneficiaries
  • A variant that generates x10 revenues
  • A variant that works x10 quicker
  • A variant that changes policy in this industry/sector
  • A variant that creates a new category of products and services
• Niche Impact provocations:
  • A variant that impacts just 10% of the imagined audience – and who make up a specific niche demographic or behaviour within the original audience
  • A variant that makes just 10% of the imagined difference (e.g. just 10% efficiencies or 10% productivity gains)
  • A variant that has just 10% of the planned features
  • A variant that turns a profit in x10 the planned timeframe
• Addresses the same problem but with a different method provocations:
  • Are there alternative technologies which might also address this problem albeit in a different way?
  • Are there other methods or approaches which might offer similar outcomes to your own approach?
  • Are there different stakeholders in the same problem space who might be engaged by alternative means?
• Uses the same method to solve a different problem provocations:
  • Could you take your methods, technology, or approach to a wholly different audience or industry and create value there instead?
  • Could you go ‘upstream’ or ‘downstream’ from the initial problem (i.e. earlier or later in a user journey or earlier or later in a ‘system’ of consequences and act there using the same or similar methods?
• Place your competitors and alternatives:
  • Can you plot ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ competitor products and services?
  • Can you plot rivals who address the same problems but via different means?
  • Can you plot rivals who use similar means to solve different challenges?
  • Could any of those rivals in the problem space or using similar means in fact be partners and collaborators?

I use it in a similar way to the way I might use SCAMPERS as a provocation (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify (Magnify/Minimise), Put to alternative use, Eliminate, Reverse, Subvert).

I’d be curious to know:

• What you think?
• If similar tools exist?
• If there are better or better-worded provocations?
• Alternative uses?