A Customer Advisory Board (CAB) can be a powerful resource for identifying new market opportunities. The CAB is a working group that becomes highly engaged in developing a key initiative of your organization.

This form of facilitated workshop's can produce results much faster than traditional market research for issues of strategic importance. The most important consideration is the make-up of your panel, the appropriateness of their input into your decision and retaining a trained facilitator to guide the group toward a solution.

Example CAB Agenda
Day 1

• Review CAB objectives and process
• Strategic overview of issues
• CAB member presentations to share experience and provide subject matter expertise

• Identify needs, problems and challenges; develop common definition of the market opportunity
• Summarize/define the opportunities
• Evaluate and prioritize for action

• Develop potential solutions using "toolkits"
• Identify technology, knowledge or process gaps needed to develop viable service offerings
• Define next steps