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, including TRIZ, stage gates, ITM, and NABC, and the policy and economic drivers behind discovery and design.
02Business Opportunity & Commercialization Assessment
Establishing the scope, scale, and quality of an opportunity, and whether a technology warrants deeper analysis.
03Business and Financial Modeling
Revenue and operational modeling, valuation, financing strategy, and the risk adjustment that life-science modeling requires.
04Transaction Design and Execution
Licensing, collaborative development, and financial investment, and the drivers and requirements of a workable transaction.
05Negotiation and Collaborative Development
The four corners of a deal, and technology transfer and venture investment simulations run under conflicting confidential constraints.
06Communicating Value
Business planning, pitching, and product positioning, addressed to the people who decide.
The technology under study changes from one cycle to the next, across genomics, neural interfaces, energy systems, water treatment, and cell therapy, and the courses are revised with it. These six competences are what a graduate carries out of the program, and they are what allow an unfamiliar scientific field to be taken up and assessed within a semester.
Teaching method
Each skill 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 by having assumptions examined by people who have watched comparable assumptions fail.
Skills development runs alongside substantive instruction. A team builds its financial model in the same weeks it learns what a discount rate must account for in a field where roughly nine in ten drug candidates never reach approval.