Ideation vs. Incubation vs. Acceleration

The goal of the Growgistics model is to produce candidate business models around developed intellectual property that is worthy of acceleration (i.e. small investment as startups).

To do this, two key and distinct areas of work are required: ideation and incubation. Without ideation, there is no reliable source of new ideas that are qualified enough to incubate. Without incubation, unqualified ideas are accelerated prematurely and without connection to business value.

Ideation

Generating ideas is a human-driven creative process requiring both subject-matter expertise and use of accelerating technologies such as AI to speed discovery and early qualification.

Human-driven Processes

  • Domain immersion: combining subject-matter expertise with rapid domain exploration
  • Source validation: ensuring that there is solid proofs behind research findings
  • Uncommon challenges: identifying gaps that might become targets for innovation
  • Opportunities: consolidating potential options for how to address innovation gaps
  • Novelty: verifying how unique or not-well-solved each opportunity is in the market

AI Assisted Processes

  • RAG and Prompts: combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Prompt Engineering techniques in the domain exploration process to generate questions, dive deep quickly, and get a sense for the size and scope of the domain
  • Common Challenges: using Conversational AI to learn what problems people are most often encountering in the domain
  • Trivial/Common Solutions: using Conversational AI to learn how people are solving common challenges
  • Competitive Advantage and Differentiation: using LLMs and other modeling techniques to contrast an opportunity to other ancillary and related solutions, including those already in a given portfolio

Incubation

Once an idea proves worthy to incubate further, it is quickly qualified using key criteria across a sequence of dependent events. There are also feedback loops throughout this process as well as time-boxes.

Scope Fitting

  • Topic potency
  • Tech credibility
  • Market impact
  • Depth of effort estimate

Evaluate Strategic Fit

  • Timing / horizon
  • Competitive advantage / differentiation
  • Funding and ROI

“Pre-totyping”

  • Consumer validation
  • Intensity and Volume proofs
  • Adjusted motion

Prototyping

  • Rapid dev
  • Frequent demos
  • Risks capture

Match to Investing

  • Investment sources engaged and aligned
  • Demos and feedback
  • Biz pitch nailed down
  • Narrow down terms

Finalize IP Transfer / Graduate

  • Legal and financial refactoring
  • Documentation done
  • Assignment of IP