Innovation & Entrepreneurship

23 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

• Business Model Canvas — Osterwalder's nine-block single-page template that renders a venture's operating logic all at once — segments, value, channels, revenue, resources, activities, partners, costs — so its components and their interdependencies become simultaneously visible and testable as hypotheses.
• Crossing the Chasm — Geoffrey Moore's refinement of the diffusion curve: adoption stalls at a structural gap between early adopters and the early majority because the two populations differ in kind — so a product must be re-architected and reference-backed, not just re-marketed, to cross.
• Customer-Discovery Theater — Diagnose fake product discovery by the single structural test of whether the inquiry is permitted to change the plan — the tell being a long track record of discovery that has never killed or redirected a roadmap.
• Effectuation — Act under genuine uncertainty by starting from the means in hand and making small affordable-loss commitments with self-selected stakeholders, letting the goal co-evolve from those commitments rather than selecting means to serve a fixed goal.
• Entrepreneurial Bricolage — The practice of building ventures by recombining the materials, skills, and slack already within reach — treating the existing inventory as the fixed input and accepting a working-but-imperfect solution rather than waiting for the textbook configuration.
• Founder Blind Spot — The venture pattern where a thesis's originator, holding the authority to reroute disconfirming signals, systematically preserves their prior instead of revising it — because revision is uniquely expensive at the authoring seat.
• Founder-Market Fit — The early-stage designation for how well a founding team brings a chosen market the specific insight, credibility, network, and motivation it demands before a product has proven itself — where motivation is the one non-substitutable component.
• Go-to-Market Wedge — Enter a broad, defended market through a narrow point where you are sharply superior and incumbents are indifferent, win decisively to accumulate compounding assets, then unfold from that foothold into the adjacent segments it has made addressable.
• Innovation Accounting — The lean-startup practice of measuring an early-stage venture's progress by validated learning — a ledger of leap-of-faith assumptions confirmed versus outstanding — rather than by vanity financial metrics that move with spend without updating belief in the model.
• Innovator's Dilemma — The pattern in which a well-run incumbent, by rationally listening to its best customers and enforcing gross-margin discipline, systematically defunds disruptive innovations and is displaced by entrants whose separate performance trajectory eventually intersects the mainstream.
• Landing-Page Test — A lean-startup demand test that publishes a page describing an unbuilt offering as if it existed, then counts costly commitment signals (sign-ups, pre-orders, deposits) from representative traffic against a pre-committed threshold — a necessary-not-sufficient gate that can kill a weak idea but never confirm a strong one.
• Market Pull — The innovation situation in which articulated demand-side need — customers naming a problem and willing to pay — directs the search of developers and investors and pulls solutions into existence; the demand-side pole of the push/pull dichotomy, keyed to where the binding constraint sits.
• Open Innovation — The strategic stance in which a firm treats its boundary as a deliberately porous, governed variable for two-way knowledge flow — importing external IP and ideas inbound and releasing uncommercialized ones outbound — gated by absorptive capacity and stranded option value.
• Pivot — Supply the missing middle option between persist and quit — a deliberate change of strategic direction that redeploys the calibrated learning from a disconfirmed bet — and locate it on a typed catalogue by asking which one dimension changes while the rest are preserved.
• Pivot Thrashing — Diagnose a team that changes strategic direction faster than any one direction can close an evidence account — so it piles up change episodes without accumulating learning — by comparing its adaptation cadence against the evidence horizon.
• Product-Market Fit — Diagnose whether a venture is ready to scale by reading pull rather than push — a reachable audience actively retaining, referring, and paying for a product that beats their current alternative, rather than the producer forcing adoption through spend.
• Regulatory Surprise — Name the venture failure in which a plan built on an assumed-stable rule environment is stranded when the rule moves, reframing that environment from a fixed constraint into a slow-moving but observable, monitorable variable.
• Riskiest Assumption Test — Rank a plan's assumptions by consequence-if-false times uncertainty times upstream-position, then spend the next effort on the cheapest credible test of the top one — the question whose answer would most reduce total wasted work.
• Supplier Concentration Risk — Exposure that arises when a buyer's dependency for a critical input rests on so few suppliers that one node's disruption propagates downstream faster than alternatives can be qualified — a shape property of the dependency distribution, not of any supplier's performance.
• Technology Push — The innovation posture in which a technical capability is developed first and a search for problems it can address follows — the inverse of demand pull, fixing the technology and ranging over problem spaces, with the multi-year match step as the load-bearing risk.
• Validated Learning — Denominate an early-stage venture's progress in a single currency — behavioural evidence from real customers that moves a specific hypothesis — and gate every candidate sign of progress through an admissible-evidence filter that discounts activity, vanity metrics, and stated intentions.
• Value Proposition — Articulate, in a structured object with named slots, what benefit an offering delivers for a specific customer segment under a specific constraint and why it beats named alternatives — a targeted, contrastive, capability-honest statement that serves as the shared referent for aligning product, pricing, marketing, and sales.
• Vanity-Metric Addiction — A team locks onto a metric chosen for how impressive it looks rather than its causal link to the outcome, then keeps it after the disconnect is known because dropping it carries social cost.