The PROBLEM template

Ideators very often jump to solutions without a spherical understanding of the problem. This leads to suboptimal solutions, waste of resources, and, eventually, opportunity cost. This problem articulation template helps in achieving a common understanding, and a shared business view on what a problem is and its key elements.

The form consists of three major sections:

The Environment: the ideator is asked to describe the environment in which the business problem exists - the ecosystem, the market forces, the key ‘players’, the impacted users, and the entities which have a vested interest linked with the problem.

The ‘Dynamics’ section asks for insights regarding the past, present, and future of the problem, e.g. when the problem first appeared and how fast it has grown in terms of impacted entities. Or, what is the expected growth of the problem, and if there are known attempts to address it.

The ‘Current state’ prompts the ideator to describe the symptoms and the impact of the problem, and how the involved parties experience it. The user may also describe the identified or plausible root cause of the problem and the conditions or events that explain or trigger it.

The ‘Ideal state’ - how success would look like if the problem were ‘magically’ solved and how the involved parties would benefit from this ideal state.

By keeping the problem description to a single page, innovators can quickly define and share problems worth solving, and the innovation community can process them equally fast. This can evolve to a standard business problem description language that helps the organization identify the right ones that deserve more focus and energy. Get the problem statement here for free. Check also the complete Innovation Toolkit