The index below includes terms that are frequently used in BRI's resource materials, the Growth Forge software, in the course of performing our services. They may often be used by, and in many cases, coined by other experts and academics working in the new business growth and innovation strategy domain. We started maintaining a collection of them here for the convenience of our clients.
Target markets are the customer segments, within a broader population of potential customers, that a company intends to sell its product or service into. Choosing them is a consequential strategy decision rather than a description: a well-chosen target market is specific enough to design a whole solution around and to reach efficiently, often beginning with a representative beachhead segment that success can be extended from.
The customer's intended or expected use for a product or service, described in terms of main Job to Be Done, key challenge, or unmet need.
Growth Forge tools that have to do with individual users and personnel as members of a project team to evaluate alignment, gaps, and risks relative to project needs.
Assumptions in your Strategy Hypothesis Model about the choices or behaviors that market segments or other actors will make. Qualitative uncertainty assumptions are assertions. Quantitative uncertainty assumptions define the range between the 10th and 90th percentiles of a normal probability distribution for an input value in your model.
Unit economics is the financial model of a single production unit or transaction — its revenue, direct costs, and contribution margin. It answers whether a business can be profitable at the level of one sale, before scale effects, and is the building block from which credible market sizing and cashflow forecasts are assembled. A strategy whose unit economics don't work at one unit rarely works at a million.
Unmet needs are the conscious or unconscious pains or desires of value-network actors — most often end customers — when trying to perform a task or achieve a desired outcome in a specific context. They are the demand-side starting point of any strategy: a solution earns the right to exist only by satisfying a need that current alternatives leave unmet. In BRI Associates' methodology, unmet needs are identified through jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) analysis — examining the job a customer is trying to get done, across the whole customer journey, is what exposes where existing solutions fall short — and are then translated into the Market Requirements a whole solution must satisfy.
