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.
Trends or changes in the environment — at the macro, industry, or organization level — that create either the need or the opportunity for a new strategy hypothesis to be viable.
The Evaluation Criteria Framework is the structured set of qualitative and quantitative criteria BRI Associates uses to evaluate a strategy hypothesis at each stage gate — the core of how BRI assesses a new business or product opportunity. The criteria are organized by the Desirability–Feasibility–Viability (DFV) lens and mapped to the six dimensions of the BRI Strategy Framework, so an opportunity is judged on whether customers want it, whether the organization can deliver it, and whether it is economically sound — not on enthusiasm or a single financial number.
An evidence level is a rating of how much confidence to place in an assumption, based on the strength of the evidence supporting it, from an untested assertion or rough estimate through to validated, real-world data. It turns "how sure are we?" into an explicit, comparable signal that guides where to gather more evidence before investing further.
An exploratory business is a new business activity built on a hypothesis carrying significant uncertainty and unknowns, whose operational focus is discovery and learning — refining the strategy and reducing risk before significant resources are committed to scaling. It is the counterpart to the core business: where the core executes a proven model efficiently, the exploratory business is still resolving what its model should be.
The extended product is everything a customer needs across the journey to get the full value of a solution, beyond what comes with the core product itself: onboarding and setup, integration with the systems the customer already uses, training, service and support, the channel that sells and delivers it, and complementary products and services. Some of it the organization provides directly. Much of it often comes from other actors in the value network, such as channel partners, integrators, service providers and makers of complementary products. The idea descends from Theodore Levitt's 'augmented product' and Geoffrey Moore's whole product. It matters most for new offerings, because in an established business the extended product usually already exists, and a new venture is easily planned as if it did too.
A project tracked in the portfolio without being fully modeled in Growth Forge — typically initiatives outside the formal innovation system such as skunkworks, BU-funded experiments, or M&A pipeline candidates. Included so the portfolio view reflects the entire innovation footprint and resource consumption, not just projects developed using the Growth Forge methodology.
