Deliberate Innovation
We co-create startups and work with founders of existing startups. However, we are unlike any venture fund, incubator, accelerator, or studio.
We leverage a unique methodology called Deliberate Innovation, as described in The Heart of Innovation and endorsed by people like Richard Rashid, founder of Microsoft Research. It guides startups past wishful thinking and tames confirmation bias and other common illusions. Innovators we work with search for Authentic Demand — situations where not buying is problematic.
This is accomplished by mapping customer situations and immunities using purpose-built tools and in a culture that minimizes cognitive errors and biases. The result is deep understanding of who the customers are for your innovation, precisely what makes them customers, and how new products can be designed and presented so that they cannot not buy.
We developed Deliberate Innovation by helping hundreds of founders build startups worth over $15B. Leveraging the best ideas in behavioral economics, psychology, and phenomenology, we sought to understand and address why the usual approaches to startups do not reliably succeed.
That said, no framework can substitute for the entrepreneur who provides direction, drive, and creativity. To succeed, startups need a protagonist. In our experience, mature founders — domain experts who have experienced the success of demand and the failure of indifference — find Deliberate Innovation to be a powerful addition to their arsenal. The earlier one utilizes Deliberate Innovation, the better positioned one is to navigate inevitable execution challenges.
While we do not create or work with startups that require overcoming binary science and technology risk, e.g, therapeutics or space travel, our methodology is sector-agnostic. Our initial domains of interest include software for healthcare, biopharma, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure.