Community Scenario Platform for Strategic Alignment
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Solution Overview
Problem
Companies face challenges in understanding their customers' visions of the future and vice versa, limiting their ability to design and deliver relevant products and services effectively.
Innovation Solution
A system and method that create community-generated scenarios by scanning the Internet for published scenarios, identifying trends and change drivers, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and providing a forum for collaborative scenario development, enabling companies and customers to align their future strategies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If companies conduct traditional scenario development processes internally, then they can maintain control and focus on their specific vision, but they lack diverse customer perspectives and community engagement
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an online platform as an intermediary that connects companies with customers and stakeholders for collaborative scenario development. This platform mediates the interaction between internal company processes and external customer perspectives, enabling diverse participation without requiring complex direct coordination mechanisms.
Solution Approach 2:
The online scenario development platform serves multiple functions: it collects customer feedback, manages scenario documentation, facilitates stakeholder collaboration, and integrates with company strategic planning processes. This multi-functional approach consolidates various activities into a single system, reducing overall process complexity while enhancing adaptability.
2Loss of information
If companies invest significant resources in understanding customer visions of the future, then they can design better products and services, but the time and cost requirements increase substantially
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements continuous feedback mechanisms where customers and stakeholders can provide input on scenario developments throughout the process. This ongoing feedback loop ensures that customer visions are accurately captured and integrated without requiring extensive upfront research, reducing both time and resource investment while improving understanding.
Solution Approach 2:
The online platform enables customers and stakeholders to independently contribute their visions, feedback, and scenario inputs without requiring extensive company intervention. This self-service approach allows the system to gather comprehensive customer vision information automatically, reducing the time and resources companies must invest while improving information quality.
3Adaptability or versatility
If companies develop detailed scenarios internally, then they can maintain strategic control, but they miss opportunities for community engagement and validation
Solution Approach 1:
The online platform serves as an intermediary that enables community engagement while maintaining company strategic control. It provides structured mechanisms for stakeholder input and collaboration without requiring direct complex negotiations or unstructured interactions, thus enabling community engagement while managing platform complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The scenario development process is segmented into distinct phases and components that can be independently managed and contributed to by different stakeholders. This segmentation allows the platform to handle complex collaboration by breaking it down into manageable tasks, reducing overall system complexity while enabling broad community participation.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments of the present invention are generally directed to systems, methods, and computer program products for creating community-generated scenarios that provide a narrative description of the future. In some embodiments, the present invention: scans the Internet for already published scenarios about the future of a particular topic; identifies underlying trends and change drivers in the already published scenarios; scans the Internet for information about the underlying trends and change drivers; publishes, in the form of abstracts, to a community of stakeholders the information about the underlying trends and change drivers; receives and publishes to the individual stakeholders the community's feedback regarding the validity, relevance, and impact of the underlying trends and change drivers with respect to the future of the topic; and provides a forum through which the community of individual stakeholders, in light of the published abstracts and feedback, can collaboratively apply their knowledge to develop community-generated scenarios about the future of the topic.