Translate Your Technical Idea into a Commercial Opportunity
The Power of the Category Map

DATE: September 17, 2008
TIME: 1:00 - 2:30PM ET

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Entrepreneurs, inventors, startup teams, commercialization-minded researchers. Incubation managers, technology transfer managers and professionals, IP marketers, licensing specialists, investors, and other commercialization professionals.

OVERVIEW
Many brilliant science and technology inventors struggle to get businesspeople to see the commercial potential of their ideas. They often speak at length about the technical merits of the idea and its superiority and spend little time discussing the commercial opportunity the idea represents. To engage businesspeople, you need to translate your idea into the commercial language they speak. You do this with a tool called a Category Map.

The concept of a category is at the core of turning good ideas into great commercial opportunities. The category is powerful: if you use it to define your idea, the language barrier will drop exponentially. You will gain credibility by explaining the context for your idea by introducing it among other competing alternatives or approaches.

In this session, Wendy will show you how to map your idea into the market landscape and category where your idea best fits. She will take you step-by-step through the process of creating a category map for your own invention and give you a coaching tutorial on how to use the Category Map to engage businesspeople in a conversation.

You will come away with practical, hands-on tools and approaches, plus real-world examples to use category maps to effectively communicate the commercial opportunity for your scientific or technical idea.

IN THIS SESSION YOU WILL LEARN:

• The concept of a market space and categories – both in theory and in practice
• The importance of anchoring your idea in a market space
• The importance of acknowledging competing alternatives in the market space
• The five rules about categories
• How to use a step-by-step guide to develop a Category Map for your idea
• How to identify the “white space opportunity” for your idea
• How to use the Category Map to engage businesspeople in conversation

YOU WILL TAKE AWAY:

1. Copies of the slide presentation material provided in advance so you can follow along and take notes
2. Toolkit of worksheets in PDF format for you to apply the tools presented in the session
3. Key concepts and frameworks for developing category maps
4. Relevant, real-world examples and case studies
5. Practical, step by step guidance from Wendy
6. Tips and lessons learned for making these tools and approaches work for you.
7. Plus, you'll receive access to Wendy's online commercialization library, The ToolShed, equipped with handouts of additional knowledge and tools related to this topic. You will be assigned a personalized code granting you access to the library of resources about the class topic.