Fusion — Applied Skills — 03
Business and Financial Modeling
The finance concepts underlying a business opportunity, and the modeling techniques needed to build scenarios and then stretch them until they break.
Modeling in Fusion is a tool for strategic decision-making rather than an exercise in spreadsheet construction. A model is only ever as good as the assumptions feeding it, which is why students spend as much time defending inputs as building structure.
Revenue modeling
The drivers underlying revenue generation, together with the assumptions about growth, demand, pricing, and the building of market share that sit beneath them.
Operational modeling
High-level models capturing enterprise and development costs, the financial implications of market-entry strategy, and the key variables underlying commercialization.
Valuation
Valuation frameworks built on those models — capital cost scenarios, discounted cash flows, projected terminal values, and work with industry comparables. With the fundamentals in place, students develop sensitivity and multivariate scenarios specific to the industry they are working in.
Financing strategies
Models for attracting and managing a range of financial resources, and the consequences each carries for financial and equity structure.
Risk adjustment is not optional. Phase-gate developments are probability-weighted to reflect cumulative clinical attrition — roughly nine percent of drug candidates move from Phase I to approval — and discount rates are set accordingly. A model that ignores this is not optimistic; it is wrong.