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.
The customer journey is the sequence of phases a customer moves through in relation to a solution. BRI Associates uses a canonical nine-phase sequence: Discovery, Evaluation, Commitment, Fulfillment, Setup/Onboarding, Use/Operation, Troubleshooting, Expansion/Upgrade, and Retirement/Exit. The point of mapping all nine — rather than only the moment of purchase — is that a customer has a different job to be done in each phase, and solutions that win on Discovery and Evaluation routinely fail on Setup or Troubleshooting, in a phase the team never analyzed.
Custom Governance is BRI Associates' practice of using deliberately differentiated operating models for innovation work, calibrated to each venture's stage and proximity to the core business. It resolves the structural tension every established company faces — capturing the synergies of the core while protecting fragile innovation work from RPP misalignment, the gap between what a new venture needs and what the core's Resources, Processes, and Priorities are optimized for. Governance shifts progressively from autonomous toward integrated as a venture matures toward scaling.
Desirability is one of the three lenses in BRI Associates' Desirability–Feasibility–Viability (DFV) evaluation. It asks whether a solution addresses a valuable unmet need and offers unique value versus the competing alternatives — in short, whether customers actually want it enough to switch. A strategy can be perfectly buildable and financially attractive on paper yet still fail the Desirability test because the need it serves is weak or already well met.
DFV — Desirability, Feasibility, Viability — is the default Holistic Evaluation structure used within BRI Associates' Innovation Methodology and Growth Forge® Software's evaluation tools. It gives an innovation team a fast, comparable read on a strategy hypothesis across three questions: what customers actually want (Desirability), what the organization can credibly build and operate (Feasibility), and what makes economic sense at portfolio scale (Viability). As a stage-gate evaluation lens it produces a structured judgment without forcing a full multi-dimensional scoring exercise on every early-stage project.
Product or business strategy that represents a new business model for the company, requires significantly new or different operational capabilities, processes, and priorities (RPPs), or creates potential customer or channel conflicts with the existing business.
Disruptive Innovation is a class of innovation project that develops entirely new products or services and creates new markets — the highest risk and highest potential reward of the three project classes in a portfolio, alongside Core and Adjacent Innovation. Because disruptive projects fall furthest from the existing business, they are the most prone to an RPP mismatch — needing resources, processes, and priorities the core organization has not optimized for — and the most likely to be starved or stopped for the wrong reasons when they are governed as if they were core projects.
