Where to Play

Tool for evaluating your market opportunities

How it works

Where to Play teaches you how to systematically identify, evaluate and prioritize your market opportunities. It’s a practical framework for commercializing new innovations.

Step 1: Generate your Market Opportunity Set

Where to Play teaches you how to systematically identify, evaluate and prioritize your market opportunities. It’s a practical framework for commercializing new innovations.

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.

The worksheet helps 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

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.

This step helps you:

  • 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

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.

  • 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

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