At High Alpha Innovation, we partner with several of the world’s leading organizations and entrepreneurs to build and launch advantaged startups at scale.

Specifically, we work with corporations, universities, states, and non-profits that — like us — believe startups are a powerful vehicle for learning and value creation.

Our collective efforts with partners lasts for about six months:

From the start of a program, all the way to a NewCo launch

And at the very beginning of our collaborative company-creation efforts is our Build process, the first few months of our venture-building initiatives when we explore ideas, validate and de-risk concepts, and develop business models.

Internal 'build' programs executed solely by our partners often end with them engaging in an Illusion of Innovation: exploring ideas without any structure — or results.

Our Build process, meanwhile, enables our partners to move seamlessly from one venture-building stage to the next, until they've created a startup of their own.

The Build process: The secret sauce to providing advantage to partners' startups

During the Build process, our team of business designers dives head in with our partner to learn quickly, iterate, and launch a venture-scalable business.

Some of our partners have existing ideas that need to be down-selected. Others start from zero and work with us to generate viable startup options.

Regardless of the origin of ideas explored, the sub-stages of our Build approach are the same: Assemble and Test phases, where explore and analyze concepts, and then a Sprint Week and Pitch Day, where we compress our six months of initial work on creating advantaged startups into four days.

During the Assemble Phase, we focus on identifying opportunities that are ripe for innovation within a certain industry.

We kick off this 4-8 week period of Assemble by defining the investment criteria for a NewCo Launch, including delivery model, alignment to the partner’s strategy and mission, and technology, among other considerations.

This ensures High Alpha Innovation and our partner are aligned on the scope of the venture-building program.

Together, High Alpha Innovation and a team from our partner organization continue to learn about would-be customers and their pain points that are worth solving and end the Assemble phase with an "opportunity": a specific stakeholder with an important, unmet, and widely held 'Job to Be Done' (JTBD).‍

Focusing solely on customers' JTBD helps us establish a problem-led ideation approach rather than a solution-driven one.  

The next eight weeks of our efforts are spent in the Test Phase. This is when we focus on developing and testing concepts. We begin with an ideation session, the first time we think about solutions tied to the themes and opportunities we identified during Assemble.

We then rigorously assumption-test, with the goal of building conviction in a solution that includes a product description and strong value proposition.

Our assumption-testing process depends heavily on interviewing subject-matter experts (SMEs) and users so that we can learn first-hand from their experience.

These interviews, along with comprehensive market and competitive research, allows our team to prioritize desirable, feasible, and viable concepts that can solve an unmet need.

This two-month period is when we put pen to paper and rapidly test solutions to build conviction in a concept for Sprint Week — the forcing function of our venture-building work.

Over four days, a carefully curated team of High Alpha Innovation employees, employees from within the partner organization, and external entrepreneurs and SMEs remove themselves from their day-to-day jobs to focus solely on launching a new company.

Throughout the week, the teams continue to build conviction in a new business by conducting customer interviews, designing product mockups, and creating a go-to-market (GTM)plan that culminates in a VC-style pitch to the partner organization’s leadership.

Our goal during Sprint Week is to come to a 'go' or 'no-go' decision. We ultimately work with partners to agree on which ideas developed during Build are worth advancing to the GTM process and launching as new, advantaged startups and which are not.

Once a decision has been made to launch a NewCo, our studio team gets to work recruiting talent, forming the business, and setting up the resources to best support the company.                       

At High Alpha Innovation, our work is based in learning and creativity. The magic of our programs lie in the intersection of our partner’s industry expertise and High Alpha Innovation’s venture-building expertise.

The defined process and language we use during each program creates an environment in which each team member is confident in our goals at each stage of the program, which allows them to participate more fully and take ownership in their role.

Because we learn, test, and iterate constantly, we spend a lot of time in ambiguity. Our goal is to put some structure around that ambiguity to allow us to move quickly and focus on testing and research rather than creating new frameworks to represent our work.

This structure is especially important when we move from an individual program to a dedicated studio, where we partner with an organization to programmatically launch startups at scale.

Process is important — but so is knowing when to deviate from the process.

We often joke that each program and NewCo we start is like a child: Each one has its own needs. Since our job at High Alpha Innovation is to build new companies, we must be flexible enough to meet the process where it is.

For example, in previous programs, we have built enough conviction to 'kill' a concept earlier than expected. This has allowed us to go deeper in our other, more viable focus areas. Luckily, we have a team full of curious, problem-led, venture-building experts who welcome this flexibility with open arms.

Whether we are kicking off the process in a different place, diverging during the Assemble Phase, or pivoting during the Test Phase, our team works hard to guide the process and partner successfully throughout the entire engagement.

We’ve created a structured process at High Alpha Innovation that allows us to learn quickly, be creative, and design advantaged startups.

If your organization wants to do the same, reach out to learn how we can build together.