1. Industry stack

Qubit hardware and fabrication. Cryogenics, vacuum, lasers, microwave and optical control. Control electronics, packaging, and interconnects. Compilers, middleware, error correction, and cloud access. Applications, consulting, security, sensing, and networking.

A platform's success depends on a broad enabling ecosystem.

2. Post-quantum migration

Organizations should inventory cryptographic assets, identify long-lived data, test standardized post-quantum algorithms, plan crypto-agility, and coordinate vendor migration. Post-quantum cryptography runs on classical systems.

Security preparation is actionable today even without a large quantum computer.

3. Proof-of-concept design

Define a narrow workload, strong baseline, success metric, data-access plan, hardware requirements, total cost, reproducibility plan, and stopping criteria. Avoid demonstrations that cannot scale or cannot outperform a realistic classical method.

A good proof of concept is designed to disprove weak assumptions as quickly as possible.

4. Applied activity

Complete a simulator or analysis exercise: reproduce the lesson's central example, record assumptions and outputs, and explain one source of error or limitation.