The Oakland TREE process™ is a proven technique that helps organisations to grow and maintain market share by identifying the best technologies to accelerate and enable new product development. The TREE process can be used proactively to identify new growth opportunities as well as to protect established market share by alerting you to potential competitor threats.
As a proven four-step process, the TREE process is ideally suited to any situation when you have a good idea about the particular market opportunities you want to target, but need to identify the best-fit technologies to give your products the functionality to meet their performance promise.
Step 1: Targeting – broadly scoping where to look for potential enabling technologies
Step 2: Reconnaissance – stakeholder research to prioritise best-fit technology options
Step 3: Exploration – developing an in-depth, detailed profile of each technology option
Step 4: Evaluation – Using the Oakland 3A’s Matrix ® analysis to assess the market viability of each option
Step 1: Targeting – identifying what to look for and where
The first step is to develop a framework to search systematically for relevant technology enablers. This includes briefing, scoping, idea generation and clustering of potential strategies and technology platforms for further exploration.
Step 2: Reconnaissance – prioritising possible solutions
The second step is often a two-stage process, starting with carefully targeted discussions with experts, stakeholders, and industry analysts to develop and test ideas and insights. This is followed by secondary research to build and validate the case. Clusters of candidate technologies will emerge that can be given a first cut score for likely applicability.
Step 3: Exploration
The third step explores outline ideas on the most feasible candidate options in more depth. Through rigorous analysis and further discussions with experts and stakeholders, outline ideas are filtered and refined, resulting in a shortlist of specific solutions.
Step 4: Evaluation
The final step is a rigorous evaluation based on the Oakland 3A’s Matrix ®. This practical decision-making tool is used to assess the value and viability of each option in terms of three key measures, the 3As: Applicability, Availability and Affordability. The outcome of this scenario modelling is a clear analysis of the opportunities, providing reliable guidance to inform decisions. For more on the Oakland 3A’s Matrix ®, see The Oakland 3A’s Matrix ®
The TREE process embodies five core capabilities that Oakland is uniquely equipped to deliver:
The TREE process is highly flexible, practical and can be applied across a wide range of sectors and scenarios, enabling you to:
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