Discovering good opportunities requires methods and tools to uncover as many possibilities, or hypotheses, as efficiently as possible and a means to develop and sort through these hypotheses to have the best ones emerge at the end.

The OD process itself can be thought of as a pipeline with many raw hypotheses entering the front, and a few,good, developed profiles emerging from the end. Like any pipeline process, it can run for as long or as short as you wish. As long as you keep putting the raw Opportunity Hypotheses in at the beginning, you will get good Opportunity Profiles coming out the end 2 months later.

The methods and tools to keep this pipeline engine running involve:

• Searching and Exploring - the means to create the raw Opportunity Hypotheses for the front end of the pipeline
• Iterative Deepening - the 'engine' that drives the opportunities through the pipeline and determines what to work on when
• Knowledge Synthesis - the means of transforming the early, 'immature' hypotheses into more mature and developed forms
• Decision Making - the means of choosing which opportunities get more time and attention

Once these methods and tools are mastered, the effort required to launch a new opportunity discovery project is minimal.