It is widely understood that it takes 100 ideas to produce one successful new product. In fact, innovation metrics for Stage Zero support the practice of generating a large quantity of ideas to be successful. However, this current practice is very inefficient from a time, cost and resource standpoint. It also does not focus on the quality of ideas, only the quantity. Within the walls of corporations, the current idea generation and testing practice is often described as “throwing ideas against a wall to see if they stick.”So how do companies develop quality ideas that will lead to success? Passively engage consumers in opportunity identification and idea generation.Knowing what all readers are thinking right now, I’d like to address one point. When I was a member of corporate innovation teams, I often said "consumers can't help you with that" when I knew the innovation tools would not provide our team any more information than we already knew. Engaging consumers in finding opportunities or brainstorming ideas was taboo. The fact was, at that time, there weren’t any tools that would allow consumers to participate in Stage Zero without relying on forgotten, misremembered, or simply unrealized behaviors and motivations.Now consumers can help with opportunity identification and idea generation. By observing and discussing the workarounds and trade-offs to problems they may not know they had, we passively engage consumers in Stage Zero. Through additional quantification of observed situations the resulting consumer-driven opportunities and ideas are real, and dare I say “validated”? There is not a DWB or Liking score, but the behavioral patterns are large enough to be measured and they were built from actual consumer behavior.Companies can finally discover opportunities and develop quality ideas from a consumer lens from the beginning, improving their chances of in-market success.