Working papers, journal articles, and research reports advancing the science of profitable venture design.
Presenting FIT startup, a venture design framework built around cash flow profitability. Developed and tested over the past decade with corporate incubators at Barclays, Pearson, BMW, Disney, and Mars, and through Cornell University’s Built to Hold Design Lab, it offers a rigorous alternative to lean startup for companies building to hold.
This paper introduces core business architectures: the DNA of a market, which solves for the commercial viability of the market itself and defines the basic shape of the product and operations for all competitors. Understanding core business architectures also shines light on the 'market creators trap', a common practice in established markets that sets ventures up to fail when creating new ones.
Discussing the systemic challenges faced by university incubation and entrepreneurship programs and introducing a more robust, profitability-centered approach.
Argues that green impact ventures should shift from swinging for transformative home runs to reliably generating incremental base hits — sustainable, profitable impact at scale.
Exploring the financial model behind lean startup using two lean mega-success stories, Amazon and Uber, by analyzing their actual business performance vs. what their valuations did for investors.
Solving first for product-market fit...is first-and-foremost an investment strategy. Examines why venture capital's investment strategy differs fundamentally from corporate and self-funded approaches.
A report from the Integrated Venture Engineering Program at Cornell examining the foundational assumptions of the startup paradigm and proposing alternatives for ventures seeking profitability.
Their high failure rates and high costs...result from the innovation methods used today to tackle it. Explores systems engineering applications to venture development for creating profitable, breakthrough business models.
Examines why ventures targeting the bottom of the pyramid so rarely achieve profitability, and what it takes to build a genuinely sustainable business serving the world's poorest consumers.
A frank assessment of why bottom-of-pyramid ventures consistently underperform financial expectations, and what the evidence reveals about the true barriers to profitable market creation in low-income contexts.
Presents the BoP Protocol — a community-based co-creation approach to building new markets at the base of the pyramid by embedding business development within the social fabric of local communities.
Challenges the assumption that unmet needs automatically translate into viable market opportunities, exploring the gap between need identification and the conditions required for profitable venture creation.