You evaluate and compare innovation projects across a portfolio by holding each project as one structured, evaluable model and applying the same criteria to every project — tuned to where each one sits in the pipeline. Growth Forge® Software is built to do exactly that: each project becomes a Strategy Hypothesis Model, evaluation criteria are configured per portfolio, financial models are comparable across projects, and the portfolio rolls up automatically. The alternative most teams live with — a fragmented patchwork of PowerPoint templates and Excel models — makes that comparison nearly impossible, because every team models differently and every portfolio roll-up is rebuilt by hand.
Evaluating and comparing projects across a portfolio depends on one thing: every project has to be represented the same way, so that dissimilar projects can be held up against each other on consistent terms. A dedicated innovation portfolio management platform makes that possible. Growth Forge is that platform. Instead of a folder of one-off Excel models and slide decks, each project lives as a structured, modifiable, evaluable Strategy Hypothesis Model, and the portfolio aggregates those models so a Core-business project and a Disruptive one can be compared with the same lens. The software holds the methodology, so teams don't have to re-impose it by hand on every new file.
The difficulty isn't a lack of effort — it's that spreadsheets and slides are general-purpose tools. They were never built for strategy hypothesis development or innovation management, so they bring no methodology of their own. To use them for strategy work, each team has to select from the wide field of available frameworks — jobs-to-be-done, the Business Model Canvas, Lean Startup, Stage-Gate, and many others — or assemble its own, and then apply it by hand inside Excel and PowerPoint. Teams choose differently and apply differently, and that is where comparability breaks down. At portfolio scale it produces four predictable frictions:
This is what teams recognize as the fragmented patchwork of PowerPoint templates and Excel models: general-purpose tooling with the methodology bolted on by hand, one project at a time. It works for a single project and quietly fails the moment you need a portfolio-level investment decision.
Getting to genuine comparability across a portfolio takes more than tidier spreadsheets. A platform that delivers it has to:
Growth Forge is built around the BRI Strategy Framework — six dimensions that capture the consequential choices and assumptions in a new-business strategy: Target Market Segments & Unmet Need, Competitive Differentiation, Whole Solution, Implementation Approach & Execution, Financial Logic, and Staging. Each project's strategy is captured as a Strategy Hypothesis Model across those dimensions, at a fidelity level that grows from low to high as the project advances.
Evaluation uses an adaptation of Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability, operationalized as configurable criteria specified at the intersection of pipeline stage and project class (Core, Adjacent, Disruptive). The catalog runs to dozens of stage-specific criteria, derived from decades of practitioner experience and customized and prioritized per client; the relevant quantity grows across stages, with higher hypothesis-model fidelity and higher investment levels.
Financials are modeled with explicit uncertainty — ranged inputs, Monte Carlo simulation, and sensitivity analysis — so a review can see which assumptions move the outcome most and focus experimentation there. Stage-gate decisions use the four canonical outcomes: Continue, Pivot, Pause, Stop. Stop is a first-class outcome — portfolio optimization, not failure. The portfolio aggregates every project's model into live distribution, resource-allocation, investment-performance, and progress views, so comparison across dissimilar projects is automatic rather than rebuilt for every review.
Underneath, Growth Forge puts BRI Associates' integrated reading of the leading strategy and innovation frameworks into software — drawing on the work of Hambrick, Christensen, Moore, Tushman, Osterwalder, and others. That is the difference between a tidier spreadsheet and an integrated methodology the software enforces.
Teams looking for portfolio-level comparison usually weigh three other options. Each solves part of the problem; none delivers consistent cross-project evaluation the way a dedicated strategy platform does.
Innovation management (idea-management) software captures ideas and tracks them through a pipeline, with scoring rubrics and collaboration around the ideation surface. That is the front of the funnel. Growth Forge adds the strategy-development depth underneath the idea — the Strategy Hypothesis Model, six-dimension framework, and configurable evaluation — for the projects that graduate into real new-business hypotheses.
General-purpose project-portfolio and documentation tools track tasks, dates, and status, but they hold no opinion about strategy or evaluation; you would still be rebuilding the methodology in attached spreadsheets. Growth Forge brings the methodology with it.
General-purpose AI assistants can discuss any framework and speed up individual analysis, but they don't persist a structured, comparable Strategy Hypothesis Model across a team and across time. Growth Forge has AI built in — an AI Industry Analyst Agent and AI Discovery and Summary Assistants, added and refined progressively, user-initiated and requiring explicit approval before results enter a project — combined with the methodology framework that makes a portfolio of strategies comparable.
Growth Forge is built for enterprise innovation leaders, portfolio managers, and the project leads inside their teams — Chief Innovation Officers, VPs of Strategy and R&D, heads of new-business exploration, and the innovation and product managers running individual projects. It is the right fit when a single project has outgrown a spreadsheet, or when a portfolio of dissimilar projects has outgrown the manual roll-up. It is built on BRI Associates' decades of practitioner experience in corporate innovation and new business development; innovation teams at companies including Intel, Honda, and W.L. Gore & Associates have worked with BRI in this space.
Growth Forge is a self-contained platform: rather than wiring strategy work across other tools, it keeps it in one structured, comparable place. It does not currently offer third-party application integrations or single sign-on.
For enterprise control, Growth Forge provides granular, role- and group-based permissions, so administrators decide exactly who can see and do what across portfolios and projects. On the AI side, the design principle is that technology serves the team rather than leading it: AI features are user-initiated and require explicit user approval before any AI-generated result becomes part of a project, an organization-level control turns AI features on or off, the AI model can be selected per organizational policy, and company data stays in private databases that are never used to train AI models.
Most teams start with one portfolio. They bring a handful of current projects into Growth Forge as Strategy Hypothesis Models, configure the pipeline stages and evaluation criteria to match how the organization already makes investment decisions, and run the first portfolio review inside the platform. The first session usually surfaces the gap between scattered files and an integrated platform on the team's own projects. A free trial is available with full enterprise features; for multi-user and enterprise rollouts, BRI sets up an orientation and trial so IT and the innovation team can validate fit before committing. Pricing and package options are tuned for different users and use cases; for enterprise and portfolio pricing, contact BRI.
By representing every project the same way and applying the same evaluation criteria to all of them, tuned to where each sits in the pipeline. Growth Forge does this by holding each project as a structured, evaluable Strategy Hypothesis Model and aggregating those models at the portfolio level — with configurable evaluation criteria per portfolio, financial modeling with explicit uncertainty, and automatic roll-up — so dissimilar projects can be compared on consistent terms instead of in one-off spreadsheets and slide decks.
Because the usual tools were built one project at a time. A spreadsheet carries its own assumptions, layout, and logic, and a slide deck freezes a strategy at a single moment — neither was designed for cross-project comparison. Across a portfolio that means every team models financials differently, strategies can't be compared on consistent terms, the assumptions an investment rests on stay buried in cells, and every review is a manual rebuild. The patchwork works for a single project and fails the moment you need a portfolio-level investment decision.
Innovation management software captures ideas and tracks them through a pipeline — the front of the funnel. Growth Forge adds the strategy-development depth underneath the idea: the Strategy Hypothesis Model, the six-dimension BRI Strategy Framework, configurable evaluation criteria at the stage-and-project-class intersection, and quantitative portfolio modeling with Monte Carlo simulation and sensitivity analysis. It works at a different layer — strategy development and portfolio governance, not idea capture and pipeline tracking.
AI accelerates synthesis and speeds up individual analysis, and Growth Forge has AI built in across multiple tools, added and refined progressively. What a general-purpose AI assistant does not do is persist a structured, comparable Strategy Hypothesis Model across a team and across time, hold the configurable evaluation framework, or produce portfolio-level visibility. Growth Forge combines AI with the methodology framework that makes a portfolio of strategies comparable.
Growth Forge provides granular, role- and group-based permissions, so administrators control exactly who can see and do what across portfolios and projects. Its AI features are governed: they are user-initiated and require explicit user approval before any result becomes part of a project, an organization-level control turns AI features on or off, the AI model is selectable per organizational policy, and company data stays in private databases that are never used to train AI models. Growth Forge is a self-contained platform and does not currently offer third-party application integrations or single sign-on.
Most teams start with one portfolio: bring a handful of current projects in as Strategy Hypothesis Models, configure the pipeline stages and evaluation criteria to match how the organization already makes investment decisions, and run the first portfolio review inside the platform. The first session usually surfaces the gap between scattered files and an integrated platform on the team's own projects. A free trial with full enterprise features is available, and for multi-user rollouts BRI sets up an orientation and trial so IT and the innovation team can validate fit first.
A free trial is available. Pricing and package options are tuned for different users and use cases; enterprise and portfolio pricing is custom — contact BRI. Current subscription detail is shown on the Growth Forge pricing page.
