OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
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Successful innovation depends on creating many diverse ideas and using a proven methodology to select and develop the best ones. Our methodology to create, develop, test and launch new adjacent initiatives has been applied and refined over two decades.
Each initiative flows through these phases with tailored time and emphasis.
Our process of generating, refining and testing ideas leads to the following divergence and convergence cycles in order to identify and select the best business opportunities.
Ideas are evaluated and developed along the following four assessment areas. Each area is pursued concurrently to create the information needed for business model creation.
Ideas become more robust as they move through the phases along the four assessment areas.
Impact Studio serves people. We start by involving the human perspective and experience in all steps of the problem-solving process; contextualizing, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing and implementing.
Adjacent initiatives have intrinsically higher uncertainty than is typically encountered in the Core. Fortunately, fields such as Decision Analysis have developed methods to identify and reduce uncertainty in a direct and proactive manner thereby providing focus for the initiative team and transparency for the stakeholders.
Predicting the size of an opportunity is a critically important and difficult task. The methods employed by Impact Studio first design explicit strategies that integrate the internal and external factors needed for success. The uncertainty and impact from these factors can then be viewed independently to build up a range of opportunities sizes.
Frequently, the financial model becomes the focal point for making an investment decision for a new initiative. Equal emphasis needs to be placed on evaluating the uncertainties and the impact they have on the financial model. Impact Studio provides an “uncertainty adjusted value” analysis to balance these perspectives.
The business model integrates all aspects of the initiative into one, cohesive hypothesis. The financial, service and information flows must represent the full system. Impact Studio pays equal attention to the needs of the target customer, our solution, financial model, internal and external partners, competition, trends, and more.
During each of the Initiative Launch phases, the goal is to test the most important areas of uncertainty. This is accomplished with an Evidenced-Based Execution Plan. For example: During Incubate, it is common to test whether the audience for the new service understands and values it to the extent assumed in the Investment Grade Proposal. In Pilot, the core uncertainties often revolve around whether the full solution contains all the needed parts and whether the organization can deliver it.
