Developing a “Logical” Vehicle to Explore Opportunity Space and De-Risking
Diversify and de-risk. Identify and prioritize critical “truths” needed.
In this level:
- You’ll learn about the meaning of scaling up and operational art. Ultimately, bringing an innovation to impact is a scaling-up endeavor. But scaling up isn’t just about making something bigger.
- Many of us have heard key phrases like “building economies of scale,” or “synergies,” or “doing more with less.” However, few realize that those things aren’t automatically achieved by growing. In fact, more often than not, making something bigger tends to make it harder to manage. Scaling up is what you do and what you build so that as your activity grows, you stand to create the conditions for achieving more with less, one of the key concepts to innovation that students are least familiar with.
- New concepts: diversification, scaling up, and de-risking.
Schedule
Week 8: The Logic and Actions of Scale
Midterm feedback and primer on how to build an experimental logic for your project (understanding the meaning of scaling up). Identifying the actions of de-risking: execution focus without risk from narrowing.
- Report back: New Problem Statement Checklist (PDF)
- Practice sheets: (1) Scale-up logic. (2) Exploration (What if) Map
- Team milestone: Opportunity to challenge other teams
Week 9: Active De-Risking: The “Build-to-Kill” Plan
Innovation as an operational art. Making failure not an option. Understanding an emerging organization as a sequence of proofs of concept. Interactive case study. Utilitarian views of IP and scale.
- Report back: New Problem Statement Checklist (PDF)
- Practice sheets: How much? Resource assessment and prioritizing next steps.
- Team milestone: Can you describe all three opportunities as a single sequence of proofs of concept?
Level Up – Teamwork: A path to clear uncertainty (de-risking)
Week 10: Team Week
Bring together the pieces of your scale-up plan. Advance your project to catch up with content by reaching out to people. Specifically, you must reformulate three distinct opportunities and road-test your hypotheses.
- Report back: Interview data chart and new Problem Statement Checklist (PDF)
- Team milestones: Talk with 20 people outside MIT. Developing a “logical” vehicle to explore opportunity space
