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Session 2: Landscape Scan, Ideation
and Roadmap Reality Check

Facilitated by Holly Burrow (EQALL), with guest speaker Gennadiy Goldenshtyn.
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Summary of Takeaways:

Roadmap Clarity

Participants were reintroduced to concept that the roadmap is a practical tool for organizing existing work and preparing for Demo Day, not just extra homework.

Collaboration & Peer Feedback

Participants were encouraged to work together and share insights on each other’s projects helped broaden perspectives and fostered a supportive cohort environment.

Landscape Scan

The session emphasized mapping both obvious and non-obvious stakeholders, and understanding the difference between users and customers for effective solution design.

Practical Tools

Activities encouraged participants to quickly assess whether solutions matched problems, highlighting the importance of clear communication and iterative feedback.

Roadmap Development

Facilitators reinforced their commitment to technical and strategic support, encouraging participants to reach out, adapt processes, and work at their own pace toward final goals.

1. Roadmap & Demo Day Alignment

The session emphasized the importance of connecting the program’s roadmap to the Demo Day event. Participants were reminded that the roadmap is not “extra work,” but a way to organize existing efforts into a cohesive plan for stakeholder engagement.

“We are not giving you busy work, we are not giving you homework, we are not giving you things to do that are extraneous to actually building what the solutions that you're working on."

The roadmap template (Word document) is available via Box, and participants should use it to structure their work. The final deliverable will be a pitch deck for Demo Day, but the Word document is the working template.
“This roadmap icon that we created is essentially a baseline pitch deck for Demo Day. Each one of these slides within this pitch deck maps directly to this roadmap.”

2. The Conversation: Summarized

Holly shared a story from her restaurant business days to create a simple example to set a baseline. She was confident that brownies—her proven best-seller—would succeed in a new location. However, despite her experience and high-quality brownies, they didn’t sell well. Meanwhile, sugar cookies sold out quickly. Holly realized she hadn’t done a landscape scan to understand the new customers’ preferences, spending months selling a product that didn’t fit the market.

The lesson: Even a great product can fail if you don’t understand your customers and context.

“We didn’t bother to understand who was at the location... We were selling a product that was too expensive for them, that actually didn’t align with the tastes of the people in the building, because we didn’t bother to ask.”

What is a landscape scan and how do you get started?

“Landscape scan is an absolutely fundamental understanding of anything truly relevant to solving whatever idea we're trying to solve. It should include things like competitive analysis, customer landscape, technology, stakeholder analysis, regulatory needs, adjacencies.
It’s not just a scan of today. You’re actually trying to predict the future.”

What should be included in a stakeholder map?

"Stakeholders. they're not always obvious.
Most of the time, they're not obvious, actually some are, many are not.
Let's go back to the Brownie example: The Landlord, not an obvious stakeholder, but very much an informed stakeholder.”

Can you share an example of a failed idea and what you learned?

We were, working with a company, that provides video surveillance equipment, Motorola. They wanted to launch the world's most perfect high-tech camera and the team labored to create that product. However, once in market they couldn't sell even 10% of their target goal.
Why? The users that truly would appreciate those cutting-edge features wanted a product that was also a physical deterrent
So, idea failed, utterly failed.
If you don't understand what the customer truly, truly wants, you'll either fail or you'll go through a few, possibly expensive, iterations.

Can you dig a little deeper into User vs. Customer?

“If I go to a restaurant, and I order a meal for me, and I enjoy it. I am both a user and a customer. So I enjoy my meal, I gave some money back in exchange for that.

If I take my child to a restaurant, and I order my kid a kid's meal. Kid is the user. Kid gets to enjoy those chicken nuggets or whatever, and if they're bad, he's unhappy, but I'm the customer.
My needs, and my kids' needs, are a little bit different. For a kid, it's important to enjoy that food. For me, I want it to be affordable. My kid doesn't care if it's affordable or not, I do.
I wanted to come out to the table fast, so my kid is not throwing crayons all over the place. And I want that food to be nutritious, because I care about my child's health. My kid doesn't care about any of those things.”

This example clearly shows that the user (the child) and the customer (the parent) have different priorities and needs, and a solution must consider both perspectives.

How do you think about testing in market versus paper prototypes?

Steve: “I'm curious how you think about testing in market, you know, versus paper prototypes to build lean, so I'm curious if there's schools of thought around testing in market.”

Gennadiy: “Piloting. Fail fast, fail small, fail cheap. One important item to first establish is what do you want to test and with who? There is a difference between a user and a customer. Try to validate early, and if it's too early for you to have the whole solution, validate a piece.”

How do you stay grounded in client needs while remaining ambitious and innovative?

Gennadiy advises focusing on what the customer needs, not just how the solution works:

“It is a brutally, brutally hard balance. Because most, people are not good in telling you what they want.
They can react, but if you actually ask a question to somebody, what do you want? They will typically struggle to answer.
The key is to really understand the needs of the customers. Both obvious needs and those uncertain subconscious needs.
Put yourself in the shoes of your, customers, users, and stakeholders. Your customers, users, and stakeholders don't care about the how. People care about how it's gonna affect them. Don't fall in love with your solution, because it's cool, fall in love with the 'what' and stay focused on what your solution can do it will do for them.

Focus on the ''what'.
Focus, perhaps, on the 'when'.
But do not to focus on the how.”

How should participants approach validation outside their industry?

Be aware, that there are other ways to solve any problem you've identified. They may be more painful, they may be not as elegant, they might be more expensive.
But any problem you can think of, there are other ways already exist that solve it.
Consider those as you review your landscape.

"Any problem you can think of, there are other ways already exist that solve it. It's just that you have a better solution in this instance, but you must be aware of all the other ways to solve it.”

The conversation was an exchange of practical wisdom, personal anecdotes, and actionable advice on innovation, validation, and stakeholder engagement.

Both Holly and Gennadiy emphasized the need for clarity, adaptability, and external perspective in developing solutions that truly meet market needs.

3. Activity 1: Rapid Collaborative Landscape Scan 

Purpose:
To help participants practice landscape scanning by identifying stakeholders, adjacent solutions, and perspectives for each cohort member’s problem/solution—beyond their own project.

How it worked:
Each participant’s problem and solution statement was posted anonymously on a shared digital whiteboard.
  • Everyone was asked to review all the statements (not just their own).
  • Using sticky notes, participants added ideas for each problem/solution:

  1. Who else might have a stake in solving this problem?
  2. What other organizations, technologies, or approaches might be relevant?
  3. What perspectives or adjacent solutions could be considered?

The goal was to generate at least one suggestion for each posted problem/solution, encouraging broad thinking and peer feedback.
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Key Takeaway:
This activity was designed to get participants thinking beyond their own work, to see how others might approach similar challenges, and to expand their understanding of the stakeholder landscape for innovation.

4. Activity 2: RAG (Red, Amber, Green) Validation Exercise

Purpose:
To help participants quickly assess whether each cohort member’s solution matches their stated problem, and to identify which ideas may need further research, refinement, or caution.
How it worked:

Participants returned to the shared whiteboard, where all problem/solution statements were posted.
Using colored dots (red, yellow/amber, green), each person flagged solutions:

  • Green: Solution seems well-matched to the problem and feasible.
  • Yellow/Amber: Solution may be hard to deliver, needs more research, or raises questions.
  • Red: Solution is unlikely to work or is fundamentally mismatched (note: in practice, no reds were given).

Participants were asked to avoid voting on their own solution, and to base their assessment on the brief statements provided.
The exercise was intentionally rapid and high-level, simulating how stakeholders might make quick “go/no-go” decisions in real-world conversations.
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Key Takeaway:
This activity helped participants practice rapid validation, recognize the importance of clear communication, and identify where more detail or iteration might be needed—mirroring real-world feedback and decision-making.

5. Wrap Up

As the session wrapped up, the facilitators reiterated their commitment to supporting participants, both technically and strategically.

They encouraged everyone to reach out for help, complete a brief post-session survey, and keep working on their roadmaps at their own pace, with only the final deadline being fixed.

The overall message was one of flexibility, collaboration, and ongoing support as the cohort continues its innovation journey.
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“We know this process is not so easy, right?
And in the world of innovation, things can go anywhere.
We are here to support you, thank you for really taking the time to participate and commit to the roadmap.”