The Market Opportunity Navigator

Make confident market decisions and unleash new growth options

Where To Play?

Current Lean Startup tools offer the details of how to play.
The Market Opportunity Navigator helps you to zoom-out to understand where to play.

The Market Opportunity Navigator is designed to help you get a clear overview of your potential market domains and make confident decisions on where to play next.

To set a promising business strategy, you need to discover your available market opportunities, assess their attractiveness and choose which ones to focus on.

The Market Opportunity Navigator guides you through this 3 step process with a visual, easy to apply framework.
Three dedicated worksheets help you to ask the right questions and make your best choices apparent.

Step 1: Generate your Market Opportunity Set

Uncovering your landscape of opportunities is challenging but crucial.

Your core abilities or technologies can create different offerings for different types of customers. Uncovering your landscape of opportunities is challenging but crucial.

A varied set of market opportunities is an asset in and of itself, as it increases your chances of focusing on the most promising option. It also provides the basis for plan-B, if required, and for unlocking new growth opportunities over time.

Worksheet 1 will help you to:

  • Understand the general functionalities of your core abilities

  • Discover new applications and customer segments

  • Get a wide-lens perspective beyond your industry boundaries

Step 2: Evaluate Market Opportunity Attractiveness

A systematic evaluation process makes sure that you haven’t forgotten any key consideration

Market opportunities can vastly differ in their attractiveness. Yet evaluating and comparing options is often an overwhelming task, with the need to generate one clear pattern from endless bits of information.

A systematic evaluation process makes sure that you haven’t forgotten any key consideration, and allows you to visually map your options and compare them. It provides the basis for team discussions so that you are less susceptible to biases and intuition.

Worksheet 2 will help you to:

  • Assess the value creation potential of each market opportunity
  • Estimate the overall challenge in capturing this value
  • Map out your opportunities to better grasp their upsides and downsides

Step 3: Design your Agile Focus Strategy

This Agile Focus Strategy helps you to bake agility into the DNA of your venture.

Market choice requires commitment which may lock you in. Yet playing in an uncertain world demands flexibility to make sure you can pivot and adapt over time. Balancing this delicate tension between focus and flexibility is challenging, especially for resource-scarce ventures.

By consciously keeping related options open, you can mitigate your risk and avoid a potentially fatal lock-in. This Agile Focus Strategy helps you to bake agility into the DNA of your venture, and has significant implications for how you build and design your company.

Worksheet 3 will help you to:

    Clearly define the primary market opportunity that you will focus on
  • Design a smart portfolio of backup and growth options to keep open
  • Say 'no' to all other options

Prof. Marc Gruber

A world-leading researcher in the domain of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.

A world-leading researcher in the domain of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. He is Vice President for Innovation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he also heads the Chair of Entrepreneurship & Technology Commercialization. He works as the Deputy Editor for the #1 empirical research journal in management, the Academy of Management Journal.

Received multiple “Thought Leader” awards for his breakthrough research. Marc is actively engaged in teaching, consulting, and executive training programs in Europe, the US and Asia, and regularly acts as a jury member in start-up and corporate entrepreneurship competitions across Europe.

Dr. Sharon Tal

co- founder and former executive director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology

Sharon is a co- founder and former executive director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a senior lecturer on marketing and entrepreneurship. She runs courses and workshops in accelerators and universities around the world, and serves as a mentor in many organizations that aim to help budding entrepreneurs.

Sharon has over a decade of experience in marketing, as she served as a marketing manager for firms in several industries, as well as extensive experience in strategic consulting. Her PhD research looked at market entry decisions of hundreds of startups and its consequences on firm performance and flexibility.

Case Studies

An extensive list of case studies
Example: "How a drone startup found their initial target market"

The Book

Available in English, German, French, Chinese and Korean

Watch Next