Fusion › Applied Skills › 02
Business Opportunity & Commercialization Assessment
Before an innovation becomes actionable commercially, someone has to establish the scope, scale, and quality of the opportunity that successful development would create.
Because Fusion teams are interdisciplinary, each member arrives able to bring their own training to bear on the question of value, and has to learn enough of the others' fundamentals to argue about it productively. Blending a structured approach to the legal, business, and scientific criteria that drive value, teams produce and iteratively refine both quantitative and qualitative analyses of an invention.
From a business perspective the reasonable opening question is whether a technology has the potential to generate profit at all. Asking it requires normalizing a great many variables, or at least assuming them favorable. The first pass examines market size and general market attributes.
Market size: is there adequate revenue potential, demand, and sustainable growth? General market attributes: what can be established at a high level about the industry and its players, including pricing, operating and manufacturing costs, key competitors, and known drivers.
Establishing a market size, a growth rate, and generalized dynamics such as cost of goods sold, typical R&D investment rates, and sales and administrative overhead gives a high-level view of how much revenue an early entrant might generate and share over a period of years. The analysis is generalized; it describes the opportunity available to any entrant.
It is a litmus test: is there enough revenue potential to proceed, and are the market's fundamentals understood well enough to judge whether this technology or this entrant is likely to succeed? Opportunities that pass go into the four-lens assessment that closes RGME 467.