Marketing Complex Innovation

Sunday June 1, 2008, 8:00 am - 6:00 pm, Boston, Massachusetts

Summary:

This course provides innovators with a walk through the process of successfully bringing complex technologies to market. Go-to-market mechanics will be discussed in detail, and a great deal of emphasis will be placed on creating solid strategic platforms that ultimately maximize the results of tactical execution and return on marketing investments. Tactical execution will be discussed in great detail including real-world examples from the marketing trenches where a “better mousetrap” never achieves commercial success without the benefit of a robust, professional marketing program (even super-innovator Thomas Edison possessed a rich and aggressive marketing acumen that rivaled his inventive genius).

Objective:

The course offers participants a uniquely comprehensive toolkit for market success — a practical and fundamental how-to roadmap that can be transformative for engineers and scientists who want to maximize the potential of their innovations. With the knowledge gained in this course, attendees will leave armed with newfound insight and an ability to better manage the process of transforming technological breakthroughs into market success.

Course Outline:

• The bright, shiny object — what have you innovated?
• Market disruption — evolution, revolution and reality
• Internal consensus — what business are you in?
• Customers — who exactly are yours?
• Customers — speaking the right language
• Customers — who influences what they buy?
• Driving need and value — asking why five times
• Messaging — finding the “Big Idea”
• Market contexts — ecosystem positioning
• The long view — visionary product roadmaps
• Public relations — the myth of over-the-wall press releases
• Anatomy of an announcement — staging a product launch
• Analyst relations — influencing the influencers
• Contributed editorial — the secret weapon
• Speaking opportunities — from panel participant to keynote superstar
• Market traction from PR — patience, work, and more patience
• Advertising — seduction, money pits, and doing it right
• Online communities and blogs - conversations in the many-to-many universe
• Measuring results — quality not quantity
• The real world — case studies from the trenches
• Interactive Q&A time — discuss actual products with course participants

Who Should Attend:

This course will benefit scientists, engineers, and other technical innovators who want a practical perspective on the marketing process involved with launching complex technical products. This course’s introduction to the marketing process is an excellent blend of high-level strategic fundamentals with the nuts-and-bolts of tactical execution.

Instructor:

Steve Schuster is chairman and founder of Rainier Corporation, a leading technology-marketing agency. He has more than two decades of industry experience marketing and designing high-technology products, and while at Rainier has been the creative force behind dozens of PR and advertising campaigns for a wide variety of complex innovations.

Mr. Schuster began his career designing speech recognition systems for renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil, and professional audio processing equipment for Lexicon. His first marketing role as a product manager for real-time data acquisition and signal processing products at Concurrent expanded into industry marketing for measurement, control, vibration, and signal intelligence markets. Following various technology marketing management and director-level roles he served as general manager of Data Translation's digital signal processing division.

Existing PR and ad agencies, he discovered as an executive, were simply not capable of digesting and intelligently communicating technologies to technical audiences. In response, Mr. Schuster launched Rainier in early 1993 with a vision credibly providing technology companies with a professional resource for bringing “complex” technologies to market.

Mr. Schuster received a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MBA, both from Northeastern University in Boston, MA.