IEEE Quantum Week 2026 · Workshop 739
Full title as submitted: From Quantum Algorithms to Industry Verticals — Methods for Accelerated Discovery, Founder-Led Intelligence, and Multi-Perspective Review
A methods workshop for people building quantum software, algorithms, and applications — and for the investors and ecosystem partners who back them.
You will not hear founder stories here. Each of the three sessions hands you one structured procedure, shows it running end-to-end on a real anonymized case, and then puts you in a small group to pressure-test it against your own situation. You leave with three methods you can run yourself the week you get home.
Three questions the day is built around. How do you map a quantum capability to candidate industry verticals quickly, treating vertical exploration as a structured search rather than an intuitive bet? How do founders themselves produce the targeted prospect intelligence that makes customer development possible in deep tech? And how do you surface disagreement between technical, commercial, financial, and operational perspectives before a vertical, a customer, or a hardware partner becomes irreversible?
Three 90-minute sessions, 4.5 hours of content. Session times below are indicative and follow the official QCE26 workshop block for Monday; they will be confirmed against the final conference break schedule. Session structure and content are fixed.
Treating vertical exploration as a structured search. How to move from an algorithmic or software capability to a ranked, defensible shortlist of candidate industry verticals — and how to know when the evidence behind a ranking is too thin to act on.
Break
Traditional market intelligence is too slow, too expensive, and too biased to support the pivots quantum software founders actually need to make. This session covers how founders produce that intelligence themselves — what to gather, in what order, and where the method stops being reliable.
Lunch
Technical, commercial, financial, and operational perspectives rarely agree — and the disagreement usually stays invisible until the decision is already expensive. This session covers structured evaluation methods that force that disagreement into the open early enough to matter. Critical and dissenting perspectives are explicitly invited.
Close
The methods apply across variational and hybrid algorithms, quantum optimization, quantum simulation, and quantum machine learning. Each anonymized case makes its algorithmic setting, application domain, technical assumptions, and evidence gaps explicit.
Founder & CEO, Quantum Advantage Partners — Toronto, Canada
Mehdi runs a fractional CRO and strategic advisory practice working with deeptech and quantum founders at the pre-Series A stage, focused on the methods used to translate scientific results into commercial outcomes under high uncertainty. He has spent the past decade in quantum commercialization roles: IBM Quantum's first Quantum Ambassador in Canada, Head of Business Development at Cambridge Quantum Computing (now Quantinuum), Chief Revenue Officer at Multiverse Computing, and mentor at Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto across multiple quantum startup cohorts. His earlier career spans roughly 25 years in HPC infrastructure, quantum computing, and AI strategy. He holds an MSc in theoretical physics and a BSc in mathematics, computer science and physics, has published in ACM CASCON and IEEE conference proceedings on quantum computing applications and hybrid quantum-classical problem solving, and serves as Board Advisor at VNQuantum, Vietnam's National Quantum Technology Network. LinkedIn
President, Women In Quantum · DR Consulting — Pasadena, USA
Denise leads DR Consulting, working with startups on sales and marketing strategy and on building the foundation for acquiring their first customers. She is President of Women In Quantum, an organization focused on community and visibility for women in the quantum field. She previously served as Chief Business Officer at Atom Computing, leading strategic partnerships and business development, and held leadership roles at IonQ and Cambridge Quantum Computing overseeing global customer development and corporate strategy. Earlier she spent many years at IBM, where she helped launch the IBM Q Startup Program and led the worldwide Quantum Ambassador team. She holds a Master's in Neurobiology and Molecular Biology from the University of Pittsburgh and a BSc in Biological Sciences from UC Irvine. LinkedIn
Questions about the workshop: mehdi@qap-partners.com