Fusion — Applied Skills
A toolbox for assessing the opportunity presented by a complex technology
Fusion provides a toolbox of skills necessary for professionals to determine and support decisions around the opportunities presented by a complex technology. They are developed through instruction and through simulation, in the fundamentals of identifying, advancing, and enhancing the value of an innovation in a commercial context.
Structured Approaches to Innovation and Research
How organizations structure and foster innovation — TRIZ, stage gates, ITM, NABC — and the policy and economic drivers behind discovery and design.
02Business Opportunity & Commercialization Assessment
Establishing the scope, scale, and quality of an opportunity. The litmus test that decides whether a technology earns deeper analysis.
03Business and Financial Modeling
Revenue and operational modeling, valuation, financing strategy — and the risk adjustment that life-science modeling demands.
04Transaction Design and Execution
Licensing, collaborative development, and financial investment: the drivers and requirements behind a transaction that actually works.
05Negotiation and Collaborative Development
The four corners of a deal, plus technology transfer and venture investment simulations run under genuinely conflicting constraints.
06Communicating Value
Business planning, pitching and storytelling, and product positioning — making the case to the people who decide.
The courses are revised and the technology under study changes entirely from one cycle to the next, across genomics, neural interfaces, energy systems, water treatment, and cell therapy. What a graduate carries out of the program is this set of competences, which is what allows an unfamiliar scientific field to be taken up and assessed within a semester.
How they are taught
None of these is delivered as a lecture series. Each is attached to a live technology and exercised against it. The licensing skill is taught through a negotiation in which the other side holds confidential instructions, and the modeling skill is taught by having assumptions examined by people who have watched comparable assumptions fail.
Skills development runs alongside substantive instruction rather than after it. A team builds its financial model in the same weeks it is learning what a discount rate must account for in a field where roughly nine in ten candidates never reach approval.