Transform the thinking of participants

At its heart, Innovation Cartography is a training tool that is designed to change how technologists (e.g., researchers, R&D personnel, new product development managers, engineers, etc…) and business people (e.g., sales and marketing personnel, management executives, MBA students, etc…) think about the technology development and commercialization processes so that they can make better decisions about which opportunities to pursue. The multiple divergent and convergent cycles of our unique process we educate participants about the iterative nature of commercialization by examining technological and market / user issues hand-in-hand. Furthermore, the hands-on experiential nature of our approach helps participants understand business concepts critical to technology commercialization.

Topics incorporated in the Innovation Cartography approach include:

Engage a community of collaborators

The Innovation Cartography approach helps facilitate networking and cross-functional dialogue and will help build shared understanding and a common language so that R&D personnel, new product development managers, sales and marketing personnel, and management executives can interact more productively after the workshop. In addition, when workshops are open up to other members of the innovation community—For example, graduate students, employees of partner organizations, and/or other professionals—and this can enhance access to new ideas, high-potential new employees, collaboration partners, etc… Finally, when founders, investors, and others from the entrepreneurial ecosystem are included these workshops can help create founding and grant proposal teams that can help move specific technological applications towards market launch.

Increased efficiency of R&D efforts

The Innovation Cartography approach guides participants through a number of divergent and convergent steps that highlights the issues that must be considered and questions that must be asked throughout the technology development and commercialization process. This can help participating organizations avoid wasting significant time and money on projects that will never have real world impact, help researchers as well as entrepreneurs pivot to consider projects that have a greater likelihood of commercial success, and help everyone recognize novel applications and alternative business models and go-to-market strategies.

These processes are appropriate for technologies at various stages of development and can achieve important outcomes for technologies in early or late stages of development as well as those that have been ‘shelved’ for various reasons:

• Early Stage Technologies. By exploring the current as well as alternative applications for in-development technologies and incorporating customer insights earlier in the R&D process we can pivot to change direction where appropriate, accelerate go vs. no-go decisions, increase the likelihood of success, and more efficiently allocate R&D resources.
• Late Stage Technologies. By examining alternative applications (market adjacencies) we can leverage core competencies and technology-based competitive advantage to identify and explore new licensing or product / service revenue opportunities.
• Shelved Technologies. Many of the challenges or assumptions that may have been considered in shelving a technology may not be as important in alternative applications. This process can bring new life to shelved technologies by creating new development paths or collaboration opportunities and eventually generate new licensing or product / service revenue.