Innovation Management is a relatively new and still emerging business management discipline, so it is often described with different terminology or potentially not even described as a specific discipline. The Growth Forge software is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate multiple use cases with similar discovery-oriented opportunity analysis of projects with highly uncertain outcomes.
Monitor and manage one or more portfolios of new product or business innovation opportunities. Facilitate their progression from simple idea to strategy hypothesis, early market traction, and beyond. The Growth Forge software allows leaders to actively manage portfolios with tools to perform comparative analysis between concepts within a portfolio and aggregate analysis of the overall portfolio potential.
The scope and focus of corporate research labs can vary widely, but in most cases, they eventually need to apply research toward business objectives. The Growth Forge software can be used to help researchers define how their research might be translated into new products or businesses. The iterative innovation methodology is essentially a variation of the steps in the Scientific Method: “hypothesis”, “experiment”, “observe/evaluate”, “repeat”. If not used directly by researchers, the software can be used as a bridge to connect research to business groups.
Early-stage startup & new business investor groups like Angel Groups, Venture Capital Funds, Accelerators, and Government Economic Development programs can use the Growth Forge software to support, manage, and vet prospective ventures.
In addition to using the software for the actual execution of innovation project and portfolio management, the software can also be used as an action-based training tool that can complement innovation talent development and training. Training participants can use the software to practice applying the innovation skills, tools and methods in the context of real-world or hypothetical projects. Trainers and coaches can use the software to easily track progress across the cohort of participants and provide real-time feedback if participants are struggling in specific areas.
Entrepreneurial MBA programs or corporate continuing education programs focus on teaching most of the core concepts and critical skills that the Growth Forge service is built around. The service can be used as the platform for facilitating an MBA capstone project or action-based learning program to students or professionals to apply all of the core entrepreneurial skills together on a real business project.
Each class or cohort can be organized into its own portfolio for easy management and the Project and Portfolio dashboards make it easy to keep track of progress. The customization features of the software make it easy to tailor the experience to their needs or focus. For example:
