Every new product or business strategy eventually arrives at the question of how the solution will actually get built and delivered. In most organizations, the answer to that question follows a predictable pattern: the team does what it knows how to do, with the partners it already has, using the development approach it used last time. Not because that's necessarily the right answer — but because the question of "how should we implement this" rarely gets the same structured analytical attention as "what should we build" or “how big is the market opportunity.”
That pattern has real costs. Some of them are visible early: an implementation approach that relies on capabilities the team doesn't have, or a supplier dependency that turns out to be harder to manage than anticipated. Others surface later: a critical component of the solution that was outsourced for expediency is now controlled by a supplier with competing interests, or the element that turned out to drive the most customer value was treated as a commodity and built to commodity standards.
Implementation choices aren't execution details. They're strategy choices — with direct consequences for competitive differentiation, resource allocation, and risk. The new Implementation Planning tool in BRI Associates’ Growth Forge® Software is built to make those choices explicit, before significant resources are committed.
Explicit Choices vs. Implicit Assumptions
The Implementation Planning tool structures two related but distinct lines of analysis.
First: Where should you build versus borrow versus buy?
Not everything in a solution deserves equal investment of internal resources. Some solution elements are important for overall functionality but don't meaningfully differentiate the offering — and are readily available from established suppliers. Building those elements in-house when capable suppliers exist is a resource allocation choice that's hard to justify on strategic grounds. The resources absorbed there are unavailable for the elements that actually drive competitive advantage.
The newly added Solution Definition Tool establishes which solution elements have the greatest impact on the requirements that customers most value. Implementation Planning connects to that output and asks: given what we know about where value is created and where differentiation lives, are our implementation choices allocating resources accordingly?
Second: How are your choices impacting your risks?
The mirror image of the first question is equally important — and less often examined. When the implementation approach for a high-impact, differentiating solution element involves a significant dependency on an external partner or supplier, that creates a specific category of strategic risk.
Supplier relationships can change. Exclusive access can be lost. A complementer today can become a competitor tomorrow. A partner who provides a capability critical to your differentiation controls more of your strategy than you may have intended. These risks don't make external sourcing wrong — sometimes it's the right answer. But they need to be visible and consciously managed, not discovered after the fact.
The Implementation Planning tool surfaces these risks explicitly, tied directly to the solution elements and performance targets where they matter most. High-risk implementation choices on high-impact solution elements become prioritized assumptions in the Growth Forge Assumptions Manager — which means they're tracked, assigned evidence requirements, and connected to the experiment plan rather than left as background concerns.
Making More of the Value Network
A consistent theme across this release is that Growth Forge models the whole solution across the full value network — not just what the organization builds directly. Implementation Planning extends that logic into the question of how the whole solution gets delivered.
The value network includes suppliers, complementers, partners, and other actors whose contributions are part of the solution customers actually receive. Those relationships are choices — and like all strategy choices, they come with trade-offs. Implementation Planning is designed to make those trade-offs visible: where should the organization maintain ownership and control, and where should it leverage the value network to deliver capabilities it doesn't need to own?
Done well, this analysis focuses internal resources on the competencies and capabilities that most directly drive competitive advantage, while drawing efficiently on the value network for everything else. Done poorly — or not done explicitly at all — the result is often the inverse: internal resources absorbed by commodity capabilities while critical differentiators are underinvested or outsourced.
Part of the Complete Strategy Hypothesis
Implementation Planning is part of a broader release that completes the Growth Forge platform’s tooling for the Whole Solution and Implementation Approach dimensions of the BRI Strategy Framework. The full release also includes a new Solution Definition tool, a dedicated Jobs to Be Done tool, an expanded Requirements tool, an updated Competitive Analysis, improved Market Sizing modeling, and a new Strategy Evaluation tool for criteria-based review of the complete strategy hypothesis.
Ready to explore the full release? Request a demo or log in to your Growth Forge account to see everything that's new. Questions? Reach out to us here.
Growth Forge® is BRI Associates' enterprise strategy development and portfolio management platform for innovation leaders and their teams.
