How to Find the Customer Hotspots for your Invention
Map a Path to the Customers, Licensees and Partners with Money to Spend
DATE: October 22, 2008
TIME: 1:00 - 2:30PM ET
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Entrepreneurs, inventors, startup teams, researchers, incubation managers, technology transfer managers and professionals, IP marketers, licensing specialists, investors, and other commercialization professionals.
OVERVIEW
Whether you’re a researcher working in the lab or a startup entrepreneur trying to ignite your venture, you have customers. The million-dollar question is: which customers represent the best commercial opportunity for your idea? Your choice of customer will dramatically influence the commercialization path that you take. Decisions about who your customer will be will affect what the final product looks like, your path to market, the team you create, and most importantly the financial return you can expect.
Exploring the customer possibilities for your invention is a critical step in building a winning value proposition for customers and investors alike – because every investor, be it a venture capitalist, a technology transfer office, or a research grant reviewer looks at your idea from the perspective of commercial value.
In this session, Wendy will equip you to use her proven tools and approaches for pinpointing the best customer and licensee targets for your invention. She will take you step-by-step through using tools such as the Market Fishbone and the Segment Strawman to find your commercial hotspots.
You will come away with practical, hands-on tools and approaches, plus real-world examples to illustrate the power of identifying and focusing on the best customer/receptor targets.
IN THIS SESSION YOU WILL LEARN:
- The discipline that early-market inventions follow to become market leaders
- How to use the Market Fishbone tool to explore multiple uses and applications for your core invention
- How to evaluate and prioritize the “hot” customer and licensee prospects for your invention
- Best practices to use the Segment Strawman tool to paint a picture of the customer environment
- How to build a technology roadmap based upon customer value points
- 10 questions to profile your target customers, licensees and partners
- What a lead customer is and is NOT
- How to engage lead customers with “conversation starters”
YOU WILL TAKE AWAY:
- Copies of the slide presentation material provided in advance so you can follow along and take notes
- Toolkit of worksheets in PDF format for you to apply the tools presented in the session
- Key concepts and frameworks to develop your own Market Fishbone and Segment Strawman
- Relevant, real-world examples and case studies
- Practical, step by step guidance from Wendy
- Tips and lessons learned for making these tools and approaches work for you.
- 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.
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Wendy Kennedy is a seasoned technology executive, award-winning professor and author. Best described as an "entrepreneurial professor," Wendy has spent more than 20 years working with private and public research labs, innovation centers, university commercialization offices, entrepreneurship and incubation centers, and others on the commercialization of ideas. Driven by her passion for igniting technology ideas into commercial successes and through her hands-on experience, she has developed unique tools and approaches to help commercialization professionals bridge the gap between brilliant discoveries and the commercial value those ideas represent. So what? who cares? why you?®: The Inventor's Commercialization Toolkit is the result of her combined experiences and is a proven methodology for extracting the commercial value from scientific and technical innovations.
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