You can't truly evaluate a new business opportunity without defining a full set of strategy assumptions. In practice, many strategy assumptions often go unstated, especially if they are assumed to be consistent with past or core business strategies. Making these assumptions explicit serves a few purposes:
The BRI Strategy Framework leverages the Hambrick/Frederickson strategy diamond as a starting point, but with some key changes that make it more precise and comprehensive. Most of the Tools in the Growth Forge® Software suite are used to define and analyze specific dimensions of your strategy and the Strategy Framework can be used like a map to understand which aspect of your strategy you are modeling or analyzing within a given tool. You will see references to this framework throughout the Growth Forge Software.
The Strategy Objective sits at the center of the framework — not as one of the six dimensions, but as the foundation they all serve. Every choice in every dimension either contributes to achieving the objective or it doesn't. Without a clear objective — and measurable strategy metrics defining what success looks like — there's no basis for evaluating whether any particular strategy choice is good or bad.
The Strategy Objective is typically part of a broader Strategic Aspiration that also includes the Environmental Catalysts creating the opportunity, a Statement of Strategic Intent (SOSI) describing the role the organization aspires to play, and the Strategy Metrics that make success measurable. Together, these elements define what the strategy is trying to accomplish — the prerequisite for dimension-by-dimension work on the strategy hypothesis itself.
With a clear Strategy Objective in place, the work of defining the strategy hypothesis itself happens across six dimensions. Every assumption, choice, and strategy belief belongs to one or more of these — together they capture what the strategy actually is.
The dimensions are presented here in the order most teams work through them when developing a new strategy, starting with Target Markets. This isn't because target markets are more important than the other dimensions, but because the number of potential customers in your target and the value of the unmet need together drive the ceiling on your strategy's potential. A small market or a weak unmet need limits what any other strategy choice can achieve. Starting with target markets grounds the rest of the work in real opportunity size.
The Target Markets dimension defines who the strategy is designed to serve and what underlying needs or jobs it addresses. Because the size of the target market and the intensity of the unmet need together determine the ceiling on what the strategy can achieve, this is typically the first dimension defined — and the one most worth validating early. A great solution built for a small or indifferent market cannot produce a great business outcome.
The Competitive dimension describes the alternatives your target market can choose from today, the basis on which they'll evaluate offerings, and how your strategy is meaningfully different. A defensible strategy requires a clear, valued, and sustainable point of differentiation — not just feature parity with established competitors.
The Whole Solution dimension describes the complete set of capabilities required across the entire customer journey and product lifecycle — not just the core product itself. Many strategies fail not because the core product is deficient, but because the extended product (onboarding, integration, support, complementary capabilities) is incomplete.
The Implementation Approach dimension describes how the organization will develop, produce, deliver, and operate the whole solution — including which elements are built internally, which are acquired, and which come through partners. Implementation options are strategic choices, but often made unconsciously, following the status quo: they determine risk, cost, time-to-market, and defensibility.
The Financial Logic dimension — sometimes called Economic Logic — captures the business model, unit economics, and financial assumptions that determine whether the strategy produces a viable, self-sustaining business. It integrates choices and assumptions from every other dimension into a quantitative view of financial outcomes.
The Staging dimension describes how strategy choices across the other five dimensions will evolve over time, based on defined triggering conditions. Strategy is rarely executed as a single fixed plan — it unfolds through a sequence of commitments made as evidence accumulates and uncertainty resolves.
The BRI Strategy Framework serves three practical purposes across the new-business development process:
1. As a structural map. Once a Strategy Objective is defined, the six dimensions provide a complete checklist for defining the hypothesis — ensuring every consequential choice is made consciously rather than defaulting to the status quo of the core business.
2. As a modeling framework. In Growth Forge® Software, each dimension maps to specific tools that capture the choices and assumptions for that dimension. The Strategy Framework lets teams understand which aspect of the strategy they're modeling within any given tool.
3. As an evaluation framework. The framework supports rigorous evaluation of a strategy hypothesis — across all six dimensions, across the specific choices and assumptions within them, and ultimately against the Strategy Objective itself. For evaluation purposes, Growth Forge streamlines the six dimensions into three broader evaluation categories: Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability. These terms originate in the design thinking tradition (developed at IDEO and popularized in Tim Brown's Change by Design) and have become widely used shorthand across the innovation community. Growth Forge applies them with specific definitions:
All three must be positive for a strategy to succeed. A common failure mode is being strong on two and weak on the third.
The BRI Strategy Framework is a proprietary framework refined over decades of strategy development experience for defining and evaluating new-business strategy hypotheses. It organizes every consequential strategy choice and underlying assumption into six dimensions: Target Markets, Competitive Differentiation, Whole Solution, Implementation Approach, Financial Logic, and Staging — all organized around a central Strategic Objective. It serves as the structural foundation for the Strategy Hypothesis Model, the central artifact in our Growth Forge Software.
The Strategy Objective is what every strategy choice serves — not another thing to be defined. Each of the six dimensions captures a type of choice or assumption that contributes to (or detracts from) achieving the objective. Without a clear objective and clear success metrics, there's no basis for evaluating whether a particular choice is the right one, or the potential relevance of key assumptions. The objective sits at the center; the dimensions radiate from it.
The BRI Strategy Framework uses the Hambrick/Frederickson Strategy Diamond as a starting point, with several modifications that make it more precise and comprehensive for new-business development: it makes the customer more explicit (Target Markets rather than Arenas), expands "Vehicles" into a full Implementation Approach dimension, adds the concept of a Whole Solution that extends beyond the core product, and supports structured evaluation of a strategy hypothesis across Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability.
The BRI Strategy Framework uses the Hambrick/Frederickson Strategy Diamond as a starting point, with several modifications that make it more precise and comprehensive for new-business development: it makes the customer more explicit (Target Markets rather than Arenas), expands "Vehicles" into a full Implementation Approach dimension, adds the concept of a Whole Solution that extends beyond the core product, and supports structured evaluation of a strategy hypothesis across Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability.
The Strategy Framework itself plays a role similar to the Business Model Canvas: both give teams a structured way to describe a business concept. Compared to the Business Model Canvas, the BRI Strategy Framework is simpler and more generalized at the top level and includes greater precision in the sub-models. It also supports both the definition of a strategy hypothesis and its evaluation. Every element of the Business Model Canvas — and its variants like the Lean Canvas — maps cleanly into one or more of the six BRI dimensions:
Staging is not represented in the Business Model Canvas — the BRI framework adds it explicitly to capture how specific triggering conditions would drive different strategy choices. The practical difference: the Business Model Canvas is designed primarily as a definitional canvas for capturing a concept; the BRI Strategy Framework is designed to serve the full lifecycle of hypothesis definition, quantitative modeling, evaluation across Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability, and staged investment decisions.
Growth Forge evaluates strategy hypotheses using a structured set of stage-appropriate criteria mapped to both the six dimensions of the Strategy Framework or simplified to the three evaluation categories of Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability. The default methodology in Growth Forge includes dozens of criteria distributed across the six dimensions, alongside quantitative thresholds on key financial and market metrics. Evidence expectations scale up across the stages of the innovation methodology workflow — early stages require directional evidence; later stages require definitive evidence before committing significant investment. Portfolio managers can configure their own criteria set to reflect their organization's specific strategic priorities.
In the BRI strategy framework, every element of a strategy model is a choice or an assumption until validated by real-world evidence. Strategy Choices are aspects of the strategy that are within the organization's control to make. Assumptions are difined as one of two types: Assertions are assumptions about how other value network actors (such as customers or competitors) will behave; and Uncertainties are quantitative assumptions defined with ranges. Distinguishing between them clarifies what the team controls, what depends on others, and what must be validated with evidence to have confidence in the modeled outcomes.
Yes. The framework itself is a conceptual tool that can be applied using any manual methods. We use it regularly with our consulting clients. Our Growth Forge Software operationalizes the framework as an integrated strategy hypothesis modeling and evaluation platform — providing tools, templates, and evaluation logic for strategic objectives and each strategy dimension — but the framework is useful as a standalone structural approach to new-product or business strategy development.
Framework concepts:
Methodology and portfolio management:
See it in practice:
