HBS Working Knowledge - A Diagnostic for Disruptive Innovation - Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson and Matt Eyring pen this interesting piece that claims that, by conducting a series of diagnostics on the opportunities in your pipeline, you can quickly identify the highest-potential opportunities.

There are 3 diagnostics they propose:

1) Customer Diagnostic - You look for signs that the existing market is "disruptable" - ie, those in which consumers are either overserved or are "unsatisfied non-consumers". Overserved consumers buy a product but don't use or don't need all the features and functionality that is offered to them. Non-consumers lack the ability, wealth, or access to use the product as they would desire.

2) Portfolio Diagnostic - You now look at your current portfolio of current and upcoming innovations to see if any of those can serve the needs of a disruptable group.

3) Competitor Diagnostic - Assess competitors to ensure that the selected opportunity takes advantage of their weaknesses and blindspots to check if the competitor will be motivated to respond to the innovation, and if so, how effective they might be at it.

Certainly an interesting article with some good insights - and if you're a fan of Innosight's and Clayton Christensen's work - then a brief look at this article will serve you well.