# Auditing the Existing Business, and the Innovation Taxonomies

## Auditing the existing business

Work three angles with the executive: challenges, opportunities, triggers. Research first (market share data, press, filings), including the confirmed competitive set's recent moves: new product releases, partnerships won, acquisitions. Present competitor findings for verification before building triggers on them; confirm and extend with what only the executive knows. Capture concrete items for their organization under each heading, seeded by the canonical examples.

### Challenges (the canonical examples, then theirs)
- Losing market share in a product line for multiple years.
- Becoming too comfortable and complacent; the team cannot work with agility and competition is creeping.
- Becoming less agile; talent is frustrated, and morale and retention are at risk.
- Drastically changing consumer behavior that is rendering the legacy business obsolete.
- Other examples specific to this organization.

### Opportunities (the canonical examples, then theirs)
- Healthy profits: invest in net new business.
- A business generating lots of cash in a relatively slow-growing market: start a new adjacent business with strategic relevance that can serve as a growth engine.
- Take an existing competency and apply it to a new product or service.
- A regulatory, cultural, or legal change opening a window.
- Other examples specific to this organization.

### Triggers (classify each real trigger they have)
- **External.** A competitor released a new product. The company made an acquisition and now generates excess free cash flow.
- **Internal, top-down strategic process.** Thorough analysis of industry trends plus company performance; strategy reviewed at the executive level.
- **Internal, bottom-up.** An employee sees an opportunity, evangelizes their team, and implements a small-scale program. The organization runs an internal competition for new ideas.

## The innovation taxonomies

Every initiative the audit surfaces gets classified on four axes. This is how the portfolio's shape becomes visible: all-sustaining and all-short-term is a portfolio that will not save the company; all-disruptive and all-long-term is a portfolio the existing business will kill.

| Axis | Values |
| --- | --- |
| **Driver** | Technology · Process · Business Model · Market Positioning · Other |
| **Time** | Short-term · Medium-term · Long-term |
| **Market Effect** | Disruptive · Sustaining |
| **Internal/External** | Internal · External (Industry) · External (Broadly) |

For each initiative: name, one-line description, and a value on each axis. Read the portfolio's shape back to the executive: where it clusters, what is missing, whether the mix matches the specific goal from Challenge #2.