Your organization has spent time, effort and collaboration learning about a specific customer need. You’ve corralled teams and thinkers, and you’ve invested resources in understanding the ins and outs of this customer need thoroughly. The hard work — lots of it — has taken place. Now you’ve successfully launched this new product or service, and your solution greatly outperforms the tools customers already use. You’re seeing now, though, that your innovation has applicability elsewhere. How do you find these other opportunities and focus on those that will be most lucrative?
How do you find those market opportunities?
Your job now is to grow your fledging business by identifying the most attractive new markets. It can be difficult to meet this challenge without knowing which markets could benefit from your solution and where it will have a competitive advantage. Plus, you may be subject to time constraints that are forcing you to make decisions and act swiftly. Under this time duress, how do you identify your target markets? A proven method: Tap into experts with decades of experience in applications where your technology will have utility. You can then dig deeply into those applications where your technology has a clear competitive advantage over existing or incumbent solutions.
A story of expert success
Let’s look at a real-life example of how you can leverage experts to find opportunities. Our client had developed a cloud-based SaaS platform for remote, flexible monitoring and access by lab managers. The goal: Track multiple labs in multiple locations that all needed to be monitored at the same time to gauge experiment progress and completion. Their creative spark was to create a dashboard to undertake and manage this monitoring by leveraging IoT sensors and applications. And this was all before IoT was a mainstream concept! Then came the “aha!” moment: The project manager realized their organization could deploy their technology into other applications with similar monitoring needs or challenges — a hunch and a hope to identify the most attractive market to extend their product. Together we embarked on a mission to help our client meet and exceed their growth potential and hope. The ultimate agenda: Find the new solutions, outperform competition, and win.
In order to leverage the wisdom of collective SME’s, we had to devise a way to convey what our client’s technology could do. This method needed to be clear, concise and effective in conveying the “wow” factor of this innovation. Together with our client, our team developed a technology brief that concisely and clearly conveyed the features, functions, benefits and advantages of this new technology. We used pictures and illustrations to show experts what our client’s technology could do, where key areas included:
- Understanding the technology
- Identifying potential applications
- Describing potential applications
- Comparing to other solutions
- Competitive advantage over incumbent solutions
- Overall appeal
Intellex cast a survey invitation to our panel, and nearly 400 experts participated and identified at least one application! Overall, we identified 53 broad markets and 5 key target markets. Our team identified the most appealing uses of this technology via expert opinion and competitive advantage. The client team was thrilled to discover their solution had an edge over their adversaries in several other markets. They immediately began to pursue these opportunities with a confirmed fit and clear upper hand. They are continuing to expand their solution into other markets today.
A win for our client
Under a tight timeline, the Intellex team helped this innovative technology team find and explore a series of new destinations for their product. We created agile solutions that brought together just the right amount of expertise and research to get the right results and best chance of success. We offered this narrowed-down, best-opportunity approach in lieu of a cumbersome, expensive, over-engineered method. When your team is looking for new destinations for your next design, Intellex may just be able to help you.
Want to learn more about how to leverage thought leadership and seasoned insights through the Intellex network for your research? Read more about our expert research here: