
Shafer's Innovation and Business Building Services
Opportunity MAPS
The challenge: Reducing time-to-market and cash burn while you develop solutions for a targeted opportunity.
Our response and the result: Along the way to a large strategic target or desired market potential, Opportunity MAPS can define a viable pathway for early market entry. Through commercialization of easier to achieve, more incremental opportunities you can accelerate revenues, generate cash flow and enable learning while capabilities or features are developed. Opportunity MAPS can also be used to:

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broadly illustrate the findings of all opportunities identified during discovery or for a potential new business platform
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provide a basis for the team to consider synergies, trade-offs and strategic options among opportunities
Our approach:
Frequently, and especially when exploring platform technologies, more than one opportunity emerges. And, in most cases, the desired opportunity may be one that is well in the future or requires development of capabilities, features, or lower costs to be viable. Opportunity MAPS are a valuable tool in these cases.
We use Opportunity MAPS to provide your team different views of the portfolio of possibilities for your technology allowing you to consider synergies, trade-offs and strategic options that can get you to market and revenue generation faster while simultaneously developing the capabilities and features required for the targeted opportunity.
For example, in one client’s case, while developing a large bio-based business based on highly pure products, the business was significantly enhanced by entering the market for a less pure, blended product. While the blended product was not a strategic opportunity long term, it did generate early sales and revenues helping accelerate the company’s development. An Opportunity MAP helped identify the blended product opportunity and several other opportunities that became part of the overall strategy for building the business on the way to the most significant potential for the company.
We have found Opportunity MAPS to be a critical tool for our client’s innovation and business growth efforts. Talk to us about how you might gain from Opportunity MAPS.
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
- St. Francis of Assisi