OUR APPROACH
Our Operating System for NPV-Positive Ventures
Integrative Venture Engineering (IVE) is a comprehensive innovation discipline that we’ve developed over two decades, in collaboration with leading corporations, academics, and investors. It draws on systems engineering principles to design and build new ventures with a significantly higher probability of success, in less time, using less money.
A DIFFERENT APPROACH IS NEEDED
The innovation playbook wasn’t built for your reality
Venture creation tools like Lean Startup and Design Thinking work well for VC-backed tech startups, but not for teams who need cash flow, cost control, and actual profitability.
When you’re a corporate innovator, a long-hold investor, or a self-funded entrepreneur, burning capital for 10 years in the hope of a big exit just doesn’t add up.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
We Hold Three Core Beliefs
Go deep on product impact
The business sector’s greatest source of impact is creating new markets, and a venture’s most effective point of leverage is its products—don’t design them for your customer needs alone.
Give me profitability or give me death
Ventures should be driven to create positive net present value (NPV). Unless your venture is generating enough cash flows to meet or exceed its opportunity cost of capital, you’re not a sustainable business.
Elegance breeds success
Businesses are complex systems and should be built as such. Elegant, well-integrated functions that generate synergies across the business are required to unleash a venture’s full power.
“Well defined is half-solved—rigor in defining what needs to be done is more important than hustle, working smarter before working faster”
OUR METHODOLOGY
Integrative Venture Engineering: A New Standard in Innovation
IVE is Half-Solved’s proprietary methodology, developed through years of applied research at Cornell University, and tested in collaboration with investors, corporates, and development institutions. It combines systems engineering with deep commercial strategy to dramatically improve your changes of success.
IVE delivers NPV-positive ventures by enabling three key performance levers:
Less Cash
↓ spend per venture
Less Time
↓ time to first profits
Better Ventures
↑ probability of success
5 CORE PRACTICES OF IVE
The IVE Process
Reduce the “venture search space” by isolating the broad use case that can most credibly generate the at-scale revenues needed to pay back all required investment capital at a competitive rate of return.
Architect ventures to shift the cost curve downwards and eliminate the underlying value barrier.
Continually assess the venture’s design using the “market creation margin”—a measure of the venture’s margin of safety and ability to absorb higher-than-expected costs and lower-than-expected demand.
Use at-scale modeling and simulation to stress test the core business architecture, avoid “dead-end” traps, and prioritize components for testing.
Build and test components first (e.g., a sales message) to ensure they work as required, before testing more complex, costly integrations (e.g., customer acquisition).
Not Just Better Process, Better Outcomes
For Builders
You’ll move faster, spend less, and launch with confidence
For Investors
You’ll reduce risk and make more informed capital allocation decisions
For Leaders
You’ll embed a capability for performance-driven venture building
Ready for an innovation approach that pays back?
If you’re tired of innovation theatre and looking for a method that delivers or audits commercially viable ventures with a positive NPV, let’s talk. We work with organisations who want to stop experimenting and start building and investing with confidence.