Identifying new markets for technology orientated solutions with a restricted primary market

Abstract

Especially small and medium sized technology orientated companies often find themselves in situations where an industry specific technical problem is solved together with a customer. After the project is finished and the developed solution is in place the supplying company often realizes that the potential to leverage the created asset by selling the solution to other customers with similar requirements could be quite high. If the developed solution solves a customer specific problem the supplying company often has to sign an exclusivity agreement, which states that the supplying company is not allowed to offer the solution to other companies which are direct competitors within the customers industry. This leads to a situation of enforced commercial underutilization of the technological asset. Basically it can be assumed that some functional characteristics of the solution could also be useful within a different industry context in a different (non restricted) market. If the technical solution in question could be adopted to a certain degree to fit a new market, it should be possible to identify new, commercially interesting, unrestricted markets. Goal of this thesis is to identify and describe a structured process to find such markets in the first place and to evaluate the attractiveness of the identified markets in second place. Already established approaches to technology push and technology resource leveraging have been reviewed and have been used as a reference to define this process. Finally, a case study for a really world solution has been conducted within the business software industry. The results of the case are quite promising as several interesting new applications have been identified based on the suggested process.