Background

DDG is the successor to Flashpoint@GeorgiaTech, which was incubated inside the university beginning in 2011, and spun out as an independent entity in 2015. Flashpoint worked with over three hundred founders in 81 startups, and also with innovation teams from some of the world’s largest businesses.

Collectively, our startups received more than $500M in venture capital, most of it from first tier VCs. As of 2024, these businesses have generated four exits, over $100M in annual revenue, over $2 billion in total capitalization.

Investors in our companies have told us that the four-month DI program is more effective than a year of traditional startup development, and often enables startups to move fast enough to skip a round of funding.

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.

Our Process

We apply Deliberate Innovation with two groups- Co-Creators (pre-launch startups) and Founders (post-launch startups) via a three-phase process:

First, innovators learn fundamentals of Deliberate Innovation through seminars, workshops, and masterclasses.

Next, innovators search for Authentic Demand by conducting hundreds of Documented Primary Interactions (DPIs), a more rigorous way to understand customers. DPIs differ in approach and intent from typical customer interviews. The DPI approach is designed to avoid biases and cognitive illusions. The intent is to map customer situations in order to uncover unmet demand. Teams gather weekly to “read out” learnings from DPIs and receive coaching and feedback from Deliberate Innovation experts. This work is done in a cohort setting to maximize learning and support.

Then, for startups we co-create, we mature the project into an independent startup, hire the right management team, help build and sell product, and lead the the initial round of funding. Investors we worked with have said startups utilizing Deliberate Innovation are able to skip a round of funding.

Team

Danny is a co-founder and Chairman of Demand Discovery Group. Danny was the CTO and General Manager, Next Generation Platform, at IBM Corp. He was responsible for creating IBM's Cloud platform and aligning IBM's direction for Cloud and Mobility. He consulted with IBM Research, is a Senior Advisor for Bridge Growth LLC, and sat on the board of directors for Finalsite LLC. Danny is a member of the Arts, Sciences, and Engineering National Council and the Hajim Dean’s Advisory Committee at the University of Rochester. He has an MA and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester and and MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel Sabbah

Matt Channof

Matt is a co-founder of Demand Discovery Group. A San Francisco-based angel investor, Matt has worked with over 30 companies and helped raise over $70M. He is an early investor in Florence Healthcare, RoadSync, Damballa, CodeGuard, Ionic Security, Parmonic, and SmartPM, and co-founded Damballa and Pramana. Matt also co-founded the startup studio Flashpoint, a first-of-its-kind deliberate innovation studio, to develop formative leaders and exceptional technology startups. He has served on the boards of early-stage logistics and cybersecurity companies, and he currently sits on eight non-profit boards in the areas of poverty, media, and education. Matt has an MA in International Economics and Politics from Johns Hopkins University.

Merrick is a co-founder of Demand Discovery Group. Merrick is also a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech. He founded Flashpoint, a first-of-its-kind startup engineering studio that developed formative leaders and exceptional technology startups. Merrick was the president of the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, and before that was a professor and dean at Carnegie Mellon. He has founded eight startups. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Merrick Furst

Erik Reinertsen

Co-Managing Director

Erik is a co-founder and CEO of Demand Discovery Group. Prior, Erik built and led data science and software engineering at Prometheus which was acquired by Merck for $10.8B. Before Prometheus, he evaluated investments at Takeda's venture capital fund and completed postdoctoral training at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Erik has an MD from Emory University, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and Statistics from Georgia Tech, and a BS in Bioengineering from UCLA where he sits on the Alumni Advisory Board.

Chandler is a co-founder and President of Demand Discovery Group. As a serial entrepreneur and full-stack software developer, Powell has operated for over a decade as a 'value-add' angel investor, brining both capital and product design/development to his portfolio. Chandler has a track record of helping early stage companies validate demand by creating prototype products in various industries including healthcare, artifical intelligence, internet security, and b2b email marketing. Additionally, Powell has an unhealthy obsession with all things aviation and vintage automotive.

Chandler Powell

Co-Managing Director

The Book

Unleash innovation &

Uncover Authentic Demand.

Innovation succeeds when the innovator’s “deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.” For the first time, The Heart of Innovation unpacks the hidden challenges facing innovators as they try to uncover authentic demand – the foundation of every successful business.

With fresh case studies ranging from IBM’s entry to the Web to a single mother facing domestic violence in a slum in Kenya, this book offers a unique and proven path to enabling readers to think more clearly about innovation and become deliberate innovators.

Ready to Co-Create?

If you are an industry expert drawn to co-creating a new venture, or involved with an early stage startup, get in touch.

Co-creating startups via Deliberate Innovation

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