Each phase of your innovation pathway comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities. Identify your innovation phase and check out our vetted key resources. Our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem includes local, state, and national organizations with access to entrepreneurship experts, events, grants, financing and social networks of technical experts.
Ecosystem Resources for Innovation Phases
Opportunity Recognition
The discovery phase in which you identify a problem and recognize that there is an opportunity for a creative solution. Alternatively, research may have led you to a new discovery and a search for an application.
Ideation
During ideation, you brainstorm ideas, applications and formulate hypotheses about your value proposition and customer segment.
Validation
You gather data through customer discovery interviews to confirm that your hypotheses about your proposed solution and the end user’s needs are correct.
Prototype and Test
Based on customer feedback and insights, prototypes are developed to communicate one's idea. They are presented to gather additional feedback and validate the proposed solution.
Minimum Viable Product
Technology and design are applied to create a solution to the value proposition. The minimum viable product is a product that demonstrates the proof-of-concept. It does not include all possible features. The MVP could be sold for profit.
Commercialization and Financing
Financing is secured to manufacture and develop a service in order to launch a new business to begin sales.
Launch
A company begins selling products and/or services and moves toward profitability in order to become a going concern.