After training thousands of people, we’ve developed a range of live training sessions so you can learn and apply the Market Opportunity Navigator in the most effective way for your organisation.
Our programs are customized for startups, enterprises, accelerators, academic institutes or consultants.
Overview
A Where to Play workshop is the fastest and most effective way to get your team or trainees familiar with the Market Opportunity Navigator.
In this interactive experience, we dive into the steps of the process, and immediately apply them through practical exercises and analysis of your own projects.
Our workshops can run either online or face-to-face.
Key objectives
Get all the knowledge and feedback you need directly from the tool’s creators. Learn how to get the most out of the worksheets, avoid common pitfalls, and apply it in concert with other Lean tools and frameworks.
Whether you are trying to design your strategic focus, find new growth opportunities, or simply equip your trainees/teams with structured tools to create common understanding, we’ve got a workshop that will fit your needs.
Topics/ possible structure
The length of a workshop can vary from a few hours to 1-2 days, depending on your objectives and time frame. It can focus on any single step of the Market Opportunity Navigator, or on the full process.
Where to Play: How to identify, evaluate and prioritize market opportunities for your business
From Quick-wins to Moon-shots: How to evaluate the attractiveness of your opportunities
Beyond existing boundaries: Identifying groundbreaking opportunities stemming from your core
Where to Impact: Setting a strategic focus for double-bottom-line ventures
The art of talking to customers: How to prepare for, conduct and analyse customer interview
“Very quickly, within one morning, we have already structured new opportunities for us and assessed how easy or challenging they would be in a very robust way… this day had certainly given us a lot of food for thought and a lot of opportunity areas to explore further”.
Overview
The personalized mentoring program guides your team in identifying, evaluating and prioritizing market opportunities for your business, through the systematic process of the Market Opportunity Navigator.
It will help you design your strategic focus smartly, align your team, and move forward with confidence.
As your coaches in this process, we will present the framework and how to apply it, support and guide your team during the validation process, and facilitate the discussions once data is gathered- to help you reach solid conclusions.
If you need some hand-holding through the process of finding your next growth engines or setting your strategic focus- this program is for you.
Key Objectives
Our job as your coaches is to help you facilitate the process: educate your team on the necessary steps, assign working groups and set milestones, support the validation process and help you compile the data to reach solid conclusions.
In a more general perspective, this guidance will give your venture the ability to apply a structured decision-making process whenever it's time to grow or revisit your strategy.
Topics/ possible structure
The program runs online or offline, and typically includes three parts:
An opening webinar
To kick-off the process, we will meet for a 3-4 hour webinar with the entire involved team. The goal is to map the core abilities of the venture and uncover different market opportunities that you can address - through Worksheet 1 of the Navigator. At the end of this session, we will choose several markets for deeper evaluation, and assign working teams to assess them.
1:1 coaching sessions throughout the validation process
Evaluating different market opportunities is a learning process in which we aim to validate our assumptions. Following Worksheet 2 of the Navigator, we will guide the teams during this learning process through 1:1 sessions, to help them set their action plan and interpret their findings.
A summary workshop
Once the evaluation process is sufficient, we will meet for another half-day session, to compile the data brought by the teams, analyse the evaluation results, and prioritize the markets to set a clear strategic roadmap through Worksheet 3 of the Navigator.
Our current priority at Edge Operations is to reposition our offer and enlarge our customer target. We identified "where to play" as the tool to naturally assist us and rapidly recognised the advantage of receiving guidance on it, to bring in expertise on the tools and external out-of-the-box opinions.
We had the great luck to get Sharon coach us. She helped us a lot by keeping focus during the brainstorms, getting out early of dead-ends and ensuring we explored ways we did not visualise at the start. Sharon really was one of us during the entire duration of the process.
Overview
One of the major challenges in realizing the full potential of an innovation lies in understanding the markets that it can address. Yet, discovering, evaluating and prioritizing different market opportunities can be an overwhelming task, where teams must generate one clear pattern from endless bits of information.
Our train-the-trainer sessions introduce and explain the structured approach of the Market Opportunity Navigator to overcome this challenge, so you can help your trainees in managing this complex process.
Key Objectives
The training sessions provide trainers with all the knowledge and supporting resources they need to master the Navigator and effectively guide others through this process.
By experimenting and applying it themselves, trainers and consultants get acquainted with this tool, understand its value, and learn how to apply it and teach it in different settings, including workshops or mentoring sessions.
We offer training sessions for educators, mentors, consultants or tech transfer officers.
Topics/ possible structure
Key topics covered during the training sessions:
Overview of the Market Opportunity Navigator and its advantages, through several case studies
How does the Navigator complements and adds value to other well-known methodologies such as the Business Model Canvas, and the Lean Startup methodology
How to apply the Navigator in a workshop setting, or in one-on-one meetings
Getting acquainted with the supporting materials for trainers: the web-app, the book, the online course, the Educators' Guide, the slide sets, etc.
“The Market Opportunity Navigator’s Methodology has a lot of supporting research.... It’s simple but not simplistic. The program was brilliantly conducted and organized to provide us with a lot of “Aha!” moments. It was super well designed, since the 1st email to the last contact. Everything was held with professionalism and kindness.”
Overview
We teach full accredited courses based on the Market Opportunity Navigator for undergrads, master students, PhDs and Postdocs, in renowned universities around the world.
During this hands-on course, students learn how to discover the most valuable market opportunities and set a promising strategic focus.
The course can run online or offline, with a threefold goal:
to understand the process of market opportunity identification and evaluation in the context of innovative technologies
to acquire the practical business tools for identifying, evaluating and prioritizing market opportunities
to apply this know-how on real inventions, and gain hands-on experience in this critical choice
Key Objectives
At the end of the course students are able to:
Identify different applications and customers for innovative technologies
Evaluate the potential and the challenge of each market opportunity
Set a promising strategy that balances focus and flexibility
Understand the complementing nature of the Market Opportunity Navigator to other well-known business tools
Topics/ possible structure
The Market Opportunity Navigator is best taught in a live-case environment.
Through multiple examples and cases, students understand the logic of each step and how to apply the worksheets, and then apply it themselves (preferably on university related inventions). As they strive to discover promising market opportunities for a specific invention, they present their work in class, get feedback, and progress in an iterative manner .
Encouraging peer learning, students in this course not only learn a lot from working on their own project, but also from understanding the challenges, mistakes, and successes of their classmates.
“Overall, this course has been very intriguing as the most applicable, 'rubber meets the road' course so far. It's nice to move away from theoretical analysis towards a very practical toolset. I've grown accustomed to a pretty predictable course format, and this course blew that out of the water. I've appreciated this practical element.”
David Geronazzo, MBA student, Management Center Innsbruck, Austria
