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 pipeline is the process of moving new opportunities into the portfolio and through a defined series of stages separated by investment decision gates, as a business strategy hypothesis is validated and its risk and uncertainty are reduced — until each opportunity eventually graduates out of the incubator into the core business or is stopped. The pipeline is process (how a single opportunity advances); it is distinct from the portfolio, which is the intentional distribution of risk across many opportunities.
PIVA — Platform of Increasing Value of Adoption — is BRI Associates' term for a platform strategy whose value compounds as adoption grows. As more users adopt the platform, more complementors invest in it; that ecosystem investment makes the platform more valuable to users, which draws still more adoption — a positive feedback loop driven by network effects and increasing-return economics. BRI uses the term deliberately to distinguish this compounding, uppercase-P kind of platform from the loose, everyday use of 'platform' to mean anything reusable (a lowercase-p platform), which can deliver operating efficiency but does not compound. The value of a true PIVA shows up as market share, top-line growth, and durable competitive barriers.
A platform strategy is a strategy built around a foundation that other products, services, and participants build on, rather than around a single product. It comes in two distinct kinds: a reuse-and-efficiency platform — a lowercase-p platform of reusable building blocks and interfaces that lowers cost and speeds development — and a value-compounding platform whose worth grows with adoption through network effects, which BRI Associates calls a PIVA (Platform of Increasing Value of Adoption). The two are not better or worse than each other; they differ in intent, expected returns, execution requirements, and risk, and they can be complementary. Most platform-strategy trouble comes from confusing the two — for example, building a reuse platform but expecting a PIVA's market-share economics.
Within Growth Forge Software, Point of View (POV) is internal shorthand for the sponsoring organization or solution offering that a project represents. All other value network actors and their roles are defined relative to the POV. In customer-facing material, this is typically referred to simply as the organization or the offering.
In an innovation context, a portfolio is the managed collection of projects, ventures, and bets an organization invests in together, deliberately diversified so that the returns from a few successes can outweigh the many that fail. Managing at the portfolio level, rather than only project by project, is how uncertainty is turned into a manageable risk.
The nesting of multiple portfolios under enterprise-wide views, organized by business unit, geography, strategic theme, or any dimension that matches how innovation is governed. Each sub-portfolio has its own objective and configuration; the enterprise view aggregates them, supporting both operational management and executive visibility.
