This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

“This book is a must for any Business Development Manager, Corporate Strategist, R&D Director, and anyone else who is accountable for growth in a corporation. It is an easy read that is practical and not fraught with useless academic theories.”

Ron Pierantozzi, Ph.D., CEO of PPT Research and Former Director, Business Development, Air Products & Chemicals, Inc.

A Breakthrough Approach to Investing in Business Innovation

Most companies analyze investments using tools that bias them against real innovation and lead them to avoid their best opportunities. This book introduces a breakthrough alternative: Opportunity Engineering.

Drawing upon recent advances in financial analysis, but without requiring a lot of math, the authors show how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities so you can pursue more high-payoff innovations. You’ll learn how to escape from the “go/no-go vise” and implement more flexible decision-making that considers all the business alternatives, models, and opportunities associated with each project. You’ll learn how to systematically structure high-potential projects to limit downside exposure and boost your potential upside.

The authors show how to define the scope of investment opportunities, identify key drivers of potential profits, document assumptions, design out major risks, and tease out key challenges and vulnerabilities.

Using these techniques, you can escape the mindset that limits you to low-impact innovations and begin pursuing serious growth opportunities--and make business uncertainty work for you, not against you.

Why companies avoid their best opportunities for innovation

Getting past risk-averse analysis that snuffs out experimentation and innovation

Systematically engineering your opportunities

Capturing the upside, slicing out the downside

Beyond rigid “go/no-go” decisions

How flexible, staged innovation creates more opportunities for delivering value

Constructing an engineered growth portfolio of innovation investments

Optimizing your mix of core-enhancing investments and high potential “long shots”

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 8 Ratings

The essential approach to new venture valuation and planning - 2008-10-25
Reviewer Rating:
If you're a business leader who currently uses Net Present Value (NPV) / Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) to measure the value of new ventures, you may be overlooking scores of high worth opportunities. NPV doesn't take into account your ability to undertake low cost information gathering exercises that help you better estimate the potential payoff of future events. Why neglect a new venture when you have low risk paths to huge upside ? Van Putten and MacMillan present a new approach: Opportunity Engineering. Unlike NPV, Opportunity Engineering (OE) is an interactive approach to valuation: you, as a leader, are prompted to introduce information-intensive project CheckPoints, such as research phases or product trials, that give you better insight into future pay-offs and provide you with calculated exit opportunities. With positive information at the CheckPoint, you continue the planned project with better assurance of profits. With negative information, you abandon for a significant salvage value. Opportunity Engineering is unique: for the first time, new venture valuation and planning are integrated into an interactive cycle that lowers risk and heightens upside at each iteration. Opportunities are no longer just stumbled upon: they can be engineered. van Putten and Macmillan's genius is in the simplicity of the approach and the conciseness and clarity of their explanation. Supporting software, from cameronassociates.biz is available and provides you with an intuitive interface to plan, value, re-engineer, and monitor your new ventures. This book is a must for corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, and business students - it will revolutionize the way you value and plan new ventures. Finally, you have, in this book, the practical tools you need to not just see opportunities, but to purposefully engineer them.

Not a 5 star business book... - 2009-03-05
Reviewer Rating:
This short and easy to read book is 50% fuzzy background on real options analysis and 50% advert for a computer program the Wharton professor author is trying to sell you. Useful, but not great. I do not think 6 out of 6 five-star reviews above represent an entirely independent sample of readers.

Developing a new venture - practical help in these pages - 2009-02-25
Reviewer Rating:
I put off reading this book because I was so busy. But, finally, I bit the bullet and guess what. This book is so short and engagingly written that I had it read (cover-to-cover) in two hours. Admittedly, I was already familiar with the concepts of DDP, real options, marketbusting, etc. My job is new business development in a large corporation, and this is my tool-set. But this book is a little gem in how it simplifies, lays out, and gives examples of the soft and hard analyses you can do to enable to you work through an uncertain business proposition in a company that craves certainty. In the current difficult economic environment, innovation has taken a big hit. So for me, this was a shot in the arm, and a timely reminder of how to build a new business without arm-waving. A colleague recently asked me to help her build a case to wake up her business area to missed opportunities and I was planning to use a reverse income statement. But the new terminology in this book is so appealing to engineers (which my company is comprised of) compared to the older, more financial nomenclature that I'm going to switch to this version. I'm also going to try out the new software. Never needed it more than now.

Maximizing Organic Growth - 2008-10-06
Reviewer Rating:
This book provides a practical approach for maximizing organic growth opportunities while minimizing downside risk. It provides the process and tools needed to execute growth strategies efficiently. A must read for all who are responsible and committed to producing corporate growth.

Excellent - 2009-07-09
Reviewer Rating:
I wish more business books were as concise, well written and to the point as this one. The authors do an excellent job introducing discovery-driven planning with real world examples. However, most of the methodology is centered around product oriented businesses. The guys who started YouTube (and more recently Twitter) have a different approach which favors scale over profitability. It would be interesting to see how the authors would deal with these types of businesses.

Browse Similar Topics

Top Level Categories:
Business

Sub-Categories:
Business > Management Strategy