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05Sections
A new category becomes understandable when the audience can connect something unfamiliar to a problem, behaviour or system it already knows. Start with what changed in the world, the decision that change creates and a familiar reference point that shows where the new thing fits. Novelty comes later, once the reader has somewhere to put it.
Category creation starts after the name
Science-led companies often lead with novelty. A new sensor, a new process, a new molecule, a new market, a new category name. The novelty may be real, and it still raises the amount the audience has to absorb before anything makes sense. A label on a new market does little work by itself.
A category becomes useful when people can say what belongs inside it, what problem it exists to solve, what it replaces or complements, why it matters now, what evidence would make it credible and what decision someone can make because it exists. If the label adds vocabulary without making those answers easier, it adds ambiguity. Founders tend to fall in love with the name. Buyers and investors care about the boundary and the decision.
Start from what changed in the world
The company should enter the story once there is a reason for it to matter. Look for an observable change in regulation, economics, supply, demand, infrastructure, technology or behaviour. Then name the pressure or possibility that change creates. A category is easier to grasp when it appears as an answer to a changed environment, and harder when it looks like something the company invented in isolation.
This matters in climate technology because many new categories form where policy, industrial systems and technical capability meet. The category usually links a scientific development to a decision that people could not make before. Research on how people process stories supports the sequence. Cognitive scientists describe the value of narrative as its causal structure. A category story that moves from change to pressure to answer gives the reader that causal chain. The studio's piece on building a why-now narrative covers how to choose the change.
Move from familiar to unfamiliar
A useful comparison reduces the first cognitive leap. DNAir, a company that captures DNA from the air to show what lives around a site, is a case we worked on. Our DNAir case study records that its old single-page site described biodiversity monitoring, so visitors placed it alongside the services it wanted to move beyond. In the founders' 2025 competition speech, which we wrote with them, a comparison with satellite imagery did the explaining. Satellite imagery once made the surface of the Earth visible, and governments, farmers, insurers and energy companies now buy it to make decisions. DNAir set out to do the same for biological data. The comparison explained one relationship, that a technology can make a hard-to-observe layer of the world visible and useful for decisions, and made no claim that the two markets are equivalent. It gave the audience a starting model.
That is the rule for analogy. Transfer structure and leave the evidence where it belongs. An analogy that borrows another market's growth curve or adoption rate borrows proof the company has not earned.
Decompose the novelty
"Nobody has done this before" sounds exciting to a founder and alarming to an investor or buyer. Break the proposition into parts and find which part is actually new. It might be the mechanism, the scale, the configuration, the customer, the contracting model, the integration, the regulation or a new combination of familiar components. When the whole proposition is presented as unprecedented, the audience loses its reference class, the set of similar past cases it would use to judge the odds. Decomposing the novelty lets them use adjacent evidence where it genuinely applies.
This becomes important in first-of-a-kind projects. Many of the uncertainties can be judged against existing classes of construction, procurement, offtake (long-term agreements to buy the output) or operation, even when the full project configuration is new. The US Department of Energy's Pathways to Commercial Liftoff reports take this approach technology by technology, looking at each path to commercial scale on its own terms.
Define the category through use
Technical definitions describe what the thing is made of. Commercial definitions also explain what the thing enables. Nature tech is a good example. The Nature Tech Collective's taxonomy framework sorts a wide field into types of technology so the market can discuss it with shared terms. For a buyer, the useful question is what decision or nature-positive outcome a technology enables, speeds up or scales. Whether it uses environmental data or remote sensing comes second. A strong category definition has two layers.
Technical boundary: what belongs inside the category.
Decision boundary: what becomes possible because it exists.
New categories are prone to inflated claims because standards are thin. That makes evidence discipline more important. Show what has been demonstrated. Separate category potential from current market reality. Distinguish a handful of successful projects from a mature, repeatable market. State where definitions are still moving. If the category is genuinely young, saying so builds credibility. The audience needs a useful map, and false certainty spoils the map.
Give each audience a way in
Broad category visions can paralyse. A company may believe its technology applies to agriculture, biodiversity, mining, infrastructure, public health and biosecurity, and it may be right. The reader still needs a concrete first use. DNAir's founders named this tension themselves. They needed to keep the size of the vision and still give each audience something concrete. The site we built keeps the ambition and leads to six application areas, each with a concrete use, and three entry offers from a feasibility study to a pilot. A new category can be large. The first decision should still be small enough to understand.
A clear category story helps buyers and investors understand a new space and leaves the market itself still to be proven. Demand still needs evidence, buyers still need incentives and the economics still have to work. Regulation may create pressure without guaranteeing adoption. Category strategy belongs next to customer research and commercial proof, as part of positioning work.
Test whether someone can classify the next example
After explaining the category, give a reader three hypothetical examples and ask them to sort them. A reader who has understood the category can say which examples belong and why, name the decision the category helps make and state what remains uncertain. A reader who cannot do those three things has heard a slogan.
Run this test with someone outside the company before any launch, deck or website rebuild. Change the explanation until the sorting works. A new category earns its place when it gives people a clearer way to see a changing world and decide what belongs in it.
Brighter Future helps science-led companies build this explanation through category and positioning work.
Sources and further reading
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