About Capturing New Markets
Capturing New Markets: How Smart Companies Create Opportunities Others Don’t is a new markets strategy book by Stephen Wunker. It reveals how organizations can systematically identify unmet needs, shape demand, and dominate new industries before competitors arrive. Drawing on decades of consulting experience and global case studies, the book provides actionable frameworks—from white space mapping to opportunity portfolios—that turn insight into growth. Ideal for executives, entrepreneurs, and strategists, it’s a corporate innovation playbook for finding your next big market.
Backed by extensive research and interviews, Capturing New Markets provides practical frameworks to:
Spot unmet customer needs before competitors do.
Test new market concepts with minimal risk.
Design business models that balance innovation with profitability.
Scale effectively once market traction begins.
This book is both a guide and a playbook for leaders, strategists, and entrepreneurs who want to know how to capture new markets—and sustain growth long after.
What You'll Learn
Frameworks and Tools for Market Creation
Capturing New Markets introduces a suite of analytical and practical tools that help leaders identify, evaluate, and enter emerging markets. These frameworks move beyond abstract strategy; they help teams decide where to play and how to win.
Key frameworks include:
The Jobs to be Done Lens: Understand what customers are really trying to achieve and uncover underserved or overlooked needs.
White Space Mapping: Spot unmet demand by identifying where customer needs intersect with company capabilities.
Timing the Entry Curve: Assess when a market is ready for disruption and how to avoid premature entry.
Market Shaping Strategy: Learn how to shape demand, influence customer behavior, and establish new buying criteria.
The Opportunity Portfolio: Prioritize investments across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons for sustainable growth.
These tools make new market creation a discipline, not a guessing game.
Case Studies & Examples
With over 150 global examples, the book draws lessons from across industries and eras—from Roman Egypt’s glass trade to modern success stories like Netflix, Nespresso, and Tata Motors. Each example illustrates how companies identified overlooked opportunities, redefined customer expectations, and built new value networks.
You’ll see how smart organizations:
Reimagine familiar industries through new lenses.
Turn constraints into catalysts for innovation.
Build business models around non-consumers and latent demand.
Scale new offerings before competitors even recognize the threat.
These stories make complex strategic ideas tangible and actionable.
Step-by-Step Implementation
Beyond theory, Capturing New Markets serves as a new market entry strategy book that leaders can immediately apply. The authors lay out a repeatable five-step process for turning insight into action:
Identify customer jobs and emerging needs.
Map the white space and assess readiness.
Build and test early market-entry prototypes.
Develop scalable business models.
Create an adaptive growth system to sustain leadership.
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Distinguishing between first movers and early movers, and revealing when being early creates durable advantages versus costly missteps.
Mapping how different business models, solution shops, value chains, and networks, shape the optimal entry strategy for startups and incumbents alike
Demonstrating through cases like Atari, Zipcar, and UnitedHealthcare how learning early, moving decisively, and balancing agility with scale lead to lasting market leadership.
table of contents
01
Why New Markets Matter
02
Finding New Markets
03
Assessing What Doesn’t Exist
04
The First Customers
05
Paths to Market Penetration
06
Entering at the Right Time
07
Fulfilling the Potential of Emerging Markets
08
Enabling the Corporation
09
A Catalytic Role for Government
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New markets are your best shot at growth, but to win them you’ll need the right toolkit. Drawing on dozens of industry interviews, in-the-trenches personal experience, and extensive research, this book lays out how companies can find, enter, and win in new markets--and organize themselves to tackle the mission successfully.
Frequently Asked Questions
About The Authors
Stephen Wunker is the Managing Director of New Markets Advisors, a global consulting firm that develops growth strategies for innovators such as Meta and the Mayo Clinic. A pioneer in mobile marketing and payments, he led the development of one of the world's first smartphones. As a longtime collaborator with the late Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School's legendary scholar of business disruption, Stephen played a key role in refining and applying his theories of Disruptive Innovation and Jobs to be Done. He has worked across sectors to help large organizations identify major opportunities and move quickly, despite legacy systems or cultural resistance.
