Enterprise innovation teams evaluate a new business idea by developing it into a testable strategy rather than judging the pitch — assessing whether it is desirable, feasible, and viable, surfacing the assumptions it rests on, and gathering evidence against the ones that matter most. Growth Forge® Software is built for exactly this: it turns each idea, concept, or new-product proposal into a structured Strategy Hypothesis Model across six dimensions, evaluates it across desirability, feasibility, and viability against configurable, stage-specific criteria, and makes the critical assumptions explicit so the team knows what to validate first. Making the strategy hypothesis — not the slide deck — the object of evaluation is what turns a gut call into an evidence-based judgment.
Most new business ideas get evaluated as pitches: a deck, a champion, and a gut call. The problem is that a raw idea or concept isn't really evaluable yet — there's nothing structured to test. The move that makes evaluation rigorous is to first develop the idea into a strategy you can actually examine: a structured set of choices and assumptions that BRI calls a strategy hypothesis. Once the idea is a strategy hypothesis, the question stops being “is this a good story?” and becomes “is this desirable to the market, feasible to build and deliver, and viable as a business — and which of the assumptions underneath it are we least sure about?” That reframing — making the strategy hypothesis the object of evaluation — turns an opinion contest into a disciplined, evidence-based judgment that holds up over time and across reviewers.
A defensible evaluation of a new-business strategy needs more than a score. In practice it requires:
Growth Forge captures each strategy as a Strategy Hypothesis Model across six dimensions — target market and unmet need, competitive differentiation, the whole solution, implementation and execution, financial logic, and staging — so the evaluation covers the full set of consequential choices rather than a headline idea. The model is digitally definable, modifiable, and evaluable, and its fidelity grows from low to high as the project advances.
Evaluation applies an adaptation of desirability, feasibility, and viability across those dimensions, scored against 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 per portfolio. Crucially, the strategy's elements are classified as choices, assertions, or uncertainties, and the critical assumptions are surfaced as a direct output of the evaluation — so the team knows exactly what to test next, and the financial model can carry uncertainties as ranges rather than false single-point precision.
This evaluation depth is what BRI Associates has refined across decades of practice — drawing on the work of Hambrick, Christensen, Moore, Tushman, Osterwalder, and others — and what makes the assessment consistent across reviewers, comparable across projects, and honest about what the strategy is actually betting on.
Most teams reach for one of three other approaches. Each captures a slice of the evaluation; none does the whole job.
Idea-management software scores ideas on a rubric — a handful of weighted questions producing a number. That ranks a list of ideas, but it doesn't evaluate a developed strategy across desirability, feasibility, and viability, and it doesn't surface the assumptions the idea depends on. Growth Forge evaluates the strategy, not the pitch.
General-purpose AI assistants can critique a plan or draft a SWOT, and Growth Forge has AI built in across multiple tools, added and refined progressively, user-initiated and requiring explicit approval before results enter a project. But a general-purpose assistant doesn't hold a consistent, configurable evaluation framework or a persistent record of which assumptions have been validated across a team and across time. Growth Forge combines AI with that framework.
The gut-and-committee approach — a review meeting and a vote — is fast but inconsistent: different reviewers weight different things, and the loudest case often wins. A structured evaluation against shared, stage-appropriate criteria makes the judgment repeatable and the disagreements specific.
Growth Forge is built for enterprise innovation leaders, portfolio managers, and the project leads who have to defend a strategy at a review — Chief Innovation Officers, VPs of Strategy and R&D, heads of new-business exploration, and the innovation and product managers building the case. It is the right fit when a team needs its evaluations to be consistent, evidence-based, and comparable rather than a matter of who presents best. It is built on BRI Associates' decades of practitioner experience in corporate innovation and new business development, originating in Intel's New Business Incubator; 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 configure the evaluation criteria to match how the organization already makes investment decisions, bring a handful of current projects in as Strategy Hypothesis Models, and run their first structured evaluations inside the platform. 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. For the related questions of running these evaluations at each gate and comparing the results across the portfolio, see how Growth Forge supports stage-gated innovation and helps teams evaluate and compare innovation projects across a portfolio.
By developing the idea into a strategy they can actually test — what BRI calls a strategy hypothesis — and assessing whether it is desirable, feasible, and viable across every consequential dimension, surfacing the assumptions it rests on, and gathering evidence against the ones that matter most. Growth Forge does this by turning each idea into a structured Strategy Hypothesis Model across six dimensions, evaluating it against configurable, stage-specific criteria, and making the critical assumptions explicit so the team knows what to validate first.
DFV is an evaluation lens that asks three questions of a strategy: is it desirable (does the market want it), is it feasible (can it be built and delivered), and is it viable (does it work as a business). Growth Forge assesses all three together rather than deferring feasibility or viability to later — and treats viability broadly, including strategic alignment and organizational constraints, not just the financial model.
A strategy's elements fall into three kinds: choices the organization controls, assertions it's making about customers and partners, and genuine uncertainties. Separating them matters because each needs a different kind of evidence — a choice needs a decision, an assertion needs validation, an uncertainty needs a quantified range. Growth Forge classifies them and surfaces the critical assumptions — the few that would change the decision if they're wrong — so validation effort goes where it actually moves the outcome.
Idea-management software scores ideas on a rubric to rank a list. Growth Forge evaluates a developed strategy across desirability, feasibility, and viability and surfaces the assumptions underneath it — a judgment on the strategy, not a number on a pitch. The criteria are configurable and tuned to each project's stage and class, so an early Disruptive concept and a late Core extension aren't held to the same bar.
AI can critique a plan or draft an 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 hold a consistent, configurable evaluation framework or a persistent record of which assumptions have been validated across a team and across time. Growth Forge combines AI with the framework that makes an evaluation repeatable and defensible.
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.
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.
