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.
A value network describes the key actors within a target domain, their roles relative to the sponsoring organization or its offering, and the relationships between them — also called an ecosystem or value chain. It spans more than the parties who help deliver the offering. It includes the actors who supply, distribute, complement, integrate, regulate, influence, and pay; the partners, suppliers, and build / buy / partner relationships that make up the implementation approach; and the competing alternatives — direct competitors, substitutes, and potential entrants — the offering is positioned against. A strategy has to account for the full set of parties whose choices determine whether it succeeds, not just the end buyer. In BRI Associates' methodology each actor also has its own jobs to be done that the whole solution may need to satisfy.
The main objects or entities within a value network. Can be defined at varying levels of specificity, from a category or grouping of similar entities to a single named organization, brand, or product.
A concise description of the value in a transactional relationship between two value network actors. For end customers, typically includes the target industry, customer, assumed unmet needs, solution offering, product category, and assumed competitive differentiation.
A business concept and strategy hypothesis that minimal resources are applied to explore and develop.
Small, dynamically formed teams to drive a Venture through the Pipeline process. The Venture team has a mix of business and technical skills as well as new business innovation methodology best practices. They are the aggregation point for knowledge and learning about the opportunity in the exploration process and become the owners of the business strategy hypothesis. Venture teams come and go as ventures start/stop.
Viability is one of the three lenses in BRI Associates' Desirability–Feasibility–Viability (DFV) evaluation. It assesses whether a strategy hypothesis will result in a financially sustainable, self-sustaining business — and, in BRI's articulation, whether it is internally coherent for the organization that will pursue it. Viability is broader than finance alone: strategic alignment and Company Fit / RPP signals are part of the judgment, because a strategy the organization cannot coherently sustain is not viable even when the spreadsheet works.
