Overview

[Opportunity maps] become your treasure map, identifying not only the islands but also the exact spots to dig for growth. Business Week

You’ve been given the ultimate mandate: find the next big growth opportunity beyond your core business. While you might see hundreds of potential openings, both inside and outside of your business, you know that your time and money are limited. You can’t go after them all. You need a unique point of view on how to create an organic growth strategy that is defensible, differentiated, and leverages your company’s competencies and assets. Yet you’re unclear on how to sift through a morass of data and information to actually arrive at clear insights about which opportunities are most promising. How can you ascertain where best to place your bets?

Executives today are increasingly being called on to find new ways to solve their companies’ growth challenges. Opportunity Mapping helps leaders reframe their market landscape and craft a strategy that prioritizes the most promising opportunities for both short and long term growth. 

Synthesizing data in this manner helps innovation teams separate the handful of opportunities they should target from the dozens they shouldn't. In a new interactive session to be held on Wednesday, December 16, 2009, innovation expert Alonzo Canada will define and describe the key attributes of successful opportunity mapping. His presentation will tell you: 

• How to reframe your landscape of opportunities
• Methods to define opportunities by bridging both needs and solutions
• How to ascertain where key value resides and determine how to address the competition 

This session is ideal for executives and business leaders responsible for product development, marketing, strategy and innovation. Teams may listen together for the same low fee - cost is per phone line, attendance unlimited.

Takeaways:

1. Access to slides used during the session via webinar technology
2. Your questions answered live by an expert during the session with follow up questions by email
3. Summary set of slides available to participants after the session

Session Leaders

Alonzo Canada is a principal of Jump Associates, a growth strategy firm based in San Mateo, California. He has particular expertise in integrating business strategy, design and consumer insights to create compelling experiences for ordinary people in markets around the globe. At Jump, he has been instrumental in helping the leaders of Fortune 100 high tech, CPG, automotive and media companies craft new solutions for driving growth and increase their innovation impact inside their organizations and in the world.  Alonzo is the former creative director of RoundArch, a CRM solutions firm spun off from Deloitte Consulting. Alonzo built and led the firm’s design practice, helping Fortune 500 clients to translate their technical capabilities, business objectives, and brand strategy, into an online presence that uniquely met the needs of its customers.

 Alonzo teaches in the Product Design Program at Stanford University and has lectured in the New Product Development course at the University of California, Berkeley.  His articles on design and innovation have been featured in BusinessWeek, the Design Management Review, and Building Design Strategy a new book collecting notable writing on the topic from various authors. A frequent lecturer at product development and innovation forums, Alonzo has spoken to the audiences of the Conference Board, the Design Management Institute, the Rotman School of Management, South by Southwest, and the Danish Economic Council. Alonzo studied Japanese for four years and spent two years teaching in Osaka. He holds two Master’s degrees, one in Design from Stanford University and one in Fine Art from Mills College, where his work involved a conceptual exploration of the liminal space between reality and fantasy.

What you will learn

• How to reframe your landscape of opportunities
• Methods to define opportunities by bridging both needs and solutions
• How to ascertain where key value resides and determine how to address the competition