Opportunity Value Assessment

Opportunity Value Assessment

Purpose

Places an identified opportunity in a two-dimensional attractiveness × feasibility matrix and assesses it from seven commercialization angles. This is the owner's own, productized framework, used in real client work — more concrete and precise than the generic opportunity-evaluation-and-judgment scaffold, which describes evaluation-and-judgment competence at a general level.

Based on

The owner's own service — the Opportunity Value Assessment product (own product) and its supporting background research "S1 — Opportunity Package: Proposal for a Simple Assessment Framework".

• Mullins' Seven Domains Model — three market-facing plus four organization-facing domains for assessing an opportunity's viability (Soren Kaplan, 2023 summary)
• Timmons model: team, opportunity, and resources in continuous interaction
• Product Opportunity Evaluation Matrix (POEM) — feasibility × attractiveness (ConnectedDale, 2023)
• TRL scale (DOE Tech-to-Market, 2021)

Requires the answers produced by ../opportunity-intake-elicitation/SKILL.md as input (or equivalent information gathered another way).

Method

1. Assess attractiveness. Four factors: market size and growth (see ../market-sizing-tam-sam-som/SKILL.md), the significance of the customer's problem/need, the strength of the competitive advantage (what's unique — technology, patent, business model), and commercial potential (margins, scalability, an initial view of revenue relative to a licensing alternative).
2. Assess feasibility/readiness. Four factors: technology readiness level (TRL, in plain language: idea → PoC → prototype → tested prototype → pilot → market-ready), resources and capability (team, partners, funding — can the critical success factors actually be delivered in practice), strategic fit (for a large company: alignment with strategy; for a startup team: alignment with the team's vision), and risks and implementation barriers (technical uncertainties, regulation, long development timelines, capital requirements).
3. Place the opportunity in a 2D matrix (a 3×3 or 5×5 grid, low–medium–high on each axis) and write a narrative interpretation of the resulting cell: what does, say, "high attractiveness / medium readiness" actually mean for this specific opportunity?
4. Identify three strengthening and three weakening factors. Honestly but constructively — the goal is to surface challenges early, not to discourage.
5. Formulate the Opportunity Hypothesis. A few-sentence summary in business terms, elevator-pitch style: what product/service, for whom, what value is promised, what makes it excellent.
6. Score the seven commercialization angles (evaluation lenses) on a 1–5 scale plus a short justification for each: market size & growth; problem strength & adoption; scalability & business model; competitive position; timing & disruption; funding and capital pathway; team & capabilities.
7. Give a preliminary License vs. Startup direction based on three criteria: market size/revenue potential, IP protectability, and the team's resources/risk tolerance. This is a direction, not a final decision — for deeper analysis see ../../../specialisation-packs/research-commercialisation/skills/spinout-vs-licensing-pathway/SKILL.md.
8. List 2–5 critical implementation factors — what needs to be solved for the opportunity to reach its full value (e.g. validating scalability, distribution partnerships, regulatory approvals, hiring commercial capability).
9. Keep the assessment a living hypothesis. Update the matrix placement and scoring as new market or technology evidence comes in — don't lock in the assessment too early on the basis of assumptions that later turn out to be wrong.

Gotchas

• Step 9 frames the whole assessment as a "living hypothesis" that should be updated as new evidence arrives — treating the matrix placement and 7-lens scores as a one-time output rather than revisiting them when opportunity-intake-elicitation answers get corrected or enriched is the most common way this framework goes stale.
• Step 7's License vs. Startup output is explicitly a preliminary direction, based on only three criteria (market size/revenue potential, IP protectability, resources/risk tolerance) — reporting it downstream (e.g. in opportunity-brief-writing) as a final recommendation skips the deeper analysis the skill itself says is required (spinout-vs-licensing-pathway).
• This skill must not confirm market size, TRL, or other figures from memory or general knowledge — every input has to trace back to opportunity-intake-elicitation's answers or be marked as an assumption; scoring the "market size & growth" lens from an analyst's own market intuition instead of the intake answers (or a flagged assumption) breaks the traceability the framework depends on.
• The 1–5 scores on the seven commercialization angles are simplifications standing in for real analysis that "still needs to be done carefully before the scoring is justified" — assigning a score without first doing (or at least sketching) the underlying market/competitor/cost work behind it produces a number that looks rigorous but isn't.
• The 2D matrix placement (Step 3) requires a narrative interpretation of the specific cell, not just plotting a dot — two opportunities that land in the same "high attractiveness / medium readiness" cell can mean very different things depending on which of the four factors drove each axis, and skipping the narrative loses that distinction.

What this skill does NOT do

• Doesn't hand down a final investment or go/no-go decision — it produces a structured assessment, comparable across different opportunities, to support decision-making.
• Doesn't replace in-depth market, competitor, or cost analysis — the matrix and scoring are simplifications, and the underlying analysis behind them still needs to be done carefully before the scoring is justified.
• Doesn't make a final license-vs-startup decision — only gives a preliminary direction.
• Doesn't confirm market size, TRL, or other figures from memory — it uses the input values supplied by the opportunity-intake-elicitation stage, or clearly flags an assumption.

Continue from here

• Next in this pack: ../opportunity-brief-writing/SKILL.md — Writes the assessment results up as a concise Opportunity Brief report.
• Deeper-dive skills in the same pack: ../market-sizing-tam-sam-som/SKILL.md, ../competitive-and-five-forces-mapping/SKILL.md
• Related skill in another pack (deeper license-vs-startup analysis): ../../../specialisation-packs/research-commercialisation/skills/spinout-vs-licensing-pathway/SKILL.md
• Related skill in another pack (research-based opportunity identification before this stage): ../../../specialisation-packs/research-commercialisation/skills/research-opportunity-recognition/SKILL.md
• Complementary, not overlapping: ../../../business-design-frameworks/skills/taste-emulation-heuristic/SKILL.md predicts a specific in-group's emotional/aesthetic reaction to a concept — a different question from this skill's commercial attractiveness × feasibility scoring; use both together for a fuller picture of an opportunity.
• This pack's shared guardrails: ../../CLAUDE.md

References

• ../../references/opportunity-frameworks-review.md — summaries of Mullins, Timmons, POEM
• ../../references/opportunity-brief-template.md — the report template for this assessment's results
• ../../CLAUDE.md — this pack's shared guardrails