Innovation is being increasingly recognised as a key factor in the growth of enterprises. As Drucker puts forth, every organization—not just businesses—needs one core competence: innovation. Consequently, it has been recognised that the opportunity identification and implementation phases of innovation are required for continuous innovation. The opportunity implementation stage has been studied extensively and given a lot of importance, but insufficient attention has been paid to the opportunity identification stage. This stage was too important to be left to chance. A planned approach to opportunity identification would help designers contribute towards innovation.

Since the seeding of innovation for a new product, the opportunity identification stage has become critical. Development takes place during this stage. This has led to the recognition of opportunity.identification phase as a creative phase that requires design thinking and approach. It has It has alsoHaving been identified, attempts require a framework or a planned process to identifyand develop new products based on these opportunities. This research study investigates the potential role of design in the opportunity identification phase to arrive at a conceptual framework for this purpose. Further, this study considers an open model of innovation wherein industries/organizations collaborate with external designers/design academia to bring a new perspective to product opportunity identification and has been carried out in this context. The motivation for investigating this area was to gain a better understanding the role of designers and design thinking in identifying opportunities for ii identification for product innovation. What were the approaches and methods that assist in arriving at various design opportunities? These are some of the issues that have been a focus of this research.