SERVICES
Whether you have mature systems or have just started your journey, Innovation and Risk LLC offers a variety of services to help you take innovation to the next level.
Let us help you accelerate and grow - while you learn to manage and mitigate risk.
GO GROW STRATEGIC PLANNING
How can we build a better strategic plan – faster?
Most strategic plans end up as a binder that never leaves the shelf. Go Grow is the AI-assisted strategic planning platform built to take the pain out of creating the plan, then close the gap between plan and execution. Greg is a certified advisor. Let him help guide your team to a clear, actionable plan supported by an execution roadmap.
The Go Grow method is a guided set of sprints, driven by input from a selected set of stakeholders. The four-phase process Goals, Reality, Options, Way, has been refined across 12 years and 300+ companies.
INNOVATION AND STRATEGY
Market Scanning &
Voice of Customer
Where are the best opportunities for your products and technologies? Finding a promising market is more than identifying a large or growing industry. The opportunity is where your capabilities intersect with a real customer problem, a willingness to pay, and a market that you can realistically serve. We develop and understanding of your current market and markets adjacent to your current products, technologies, and capabilities to identify potential opportunities for growth. We can then use unbiased Voice of Customer discussions with current, former, and prospective customers to understand the problems they actually face, how they overcome them today, and the value they place on better solutions. This process can be used to test the market fit of an existing product or technology idea—or establish the foundation for developing entirely new offerings. Either way, you'll have a clearer understanding of where the market is pulling you and where your capabilities can create meaningful value.
Phase Gate Process
Design & Optimization
How do we make better decisions about which projects to fund—and when? A good Phase Gate process helps a company make informed investment decisions as a product or innovation moves from concept to launch. Instead of committing resources all at once, the team establishes clear benchmarks for each stage and uses the results to decide whether to continue, change direction, or stop. Done well, Phase Gate is more than an R&D or engineering process. It brings marketing, operations, finance, engineering, sales, and other functions together around a clear market need, value proposition, business case, and path to launch. The result is better alignment, earlier identification of problems, and less risk of investing heavily in an opportunity that isn't ready. Whether you are building a Phase Gate process for the first time or improving an existing one, we assess your current approach and develop a system that fits your business, portfolio, and level of process maturity. Each function helps shape the process and understands its responsibilities at every stage. The result is a right-sized process that helps your team invest with greater confidence, move good opportunities forward faster, and stop or redirect weak ones earlier.
Capacity Analysis and
Growth Planning
Can your team and equipment deliver the growth you're planning for? A successful new product or service is only valuable if you can deliver it reliably. As demand grows, constraints in equipment, people, processes, or facilities can quickly become the limiting factor. We assess your current production capability against your growth plans to identify where capacity will become constrained, when those constraints are likely to occur, and what needs to change to support growth. The analysis considers both equipment and staffing, helping you plan investments and resources before they become urgent. The result is a practical roadmap for building the capacity, capability, and reliability needed to turn your growth plans into reality.
Go Grow
Strategic Planning
How can we build a better strategic plan – faster? Most strategic plans end up as a binder that never leaves the shelf. Go Grow is the AI-assisted strategic planning platform built to take the pain out of creating the plan, then close the gap between plan and execution. Greg is a certified advisor. Let him help guide your team to a clear, actionable plan supported by an execution roadmap. The Go Grow method is a guided set of sprints, driven by input from a selected set of stakeholders. The four-phase process Goals, Reality, Options, Way, has been refined across 12 years and 300+ companies. Learn more about Go Grow at GoGrow.AI
Introduction to
Futurecasting
How do we prepare today for what the future might bring? If you want to predict the future, you've come to the wrong place. Futurecasting is about something more useful: imagining plausible futures, understanding what could lead us there, and preparing to respond—or even influence which future emerges. We approach the future through empathy: imagine a person, in a place, with a problem ten years from now. Ten years is far enough away to break free from today's assumptions, but close enough to imagine a future that could actually happen. Together, we'll explore multiple possible futures and work backward to identify what you can do today to prepare for them. You'll leave with: - Clear innovation targets—actions you can take now and opportunities to pursue if specific conditions emerge. - Gates and flags—signals to watch that indicate which future may be developing and when it is time to act. - A more engaged team—people who have actively explored the future together and understand what it could mean for the business. Futurecasting doesn't tell you what will happen. It helps you become ready for what could happen.
Megatrends and Future Consequences Workshop
What outside changes could create your next opportunity—or blindside your business? Major shifts in regulation, policy, or technology, demographics, and consumer behavior can create consequences far beyond their initial effects. The first-order impact may be obvious, but the opportunities and risks that emerge several steps downstream are much harder to anticipate. Consider asbestos regulation: product reformulation was an obvious first-order effect. The more interesting question was what the resulting changes would mean for other industries, products, and markets. In this workshop, we take a major trend relevant to your business and systematically explore its potential consequences. We look for new markets, products, services, and business models, while also identifying risks to your current portfolio. The goal is to help you see where change could create an advantage—not simply where it could create a problem. A typical workshop surfaces 2–3 potential risks and 2–3 longer-term (Horizon 3) opportunities for further exploration.
RISK & STRATEGY ASSESSMENT
Innovation Maturity
Assessment
Are your innovation processes a collaborative process? A well-oiled machine? Some companies have innovation woven into every part of the business: costs are predictable, timelines are clear, and risk is already understood before a project launches. Others still treat innovation as one department's job, handled tactically, with risks nobody's watching for. Most companies fall somewhere in between, and it helps to know exactly where. I'll spend time with your team assessing your innovation systems across the business: where you're strong, where the gaps are, and what's standing between you and more predictable and profitable outcomes.
Risk Assessment
Workshop
Do you understand your risks? Prioritize them? If not, how do you decide what to do about them? Every business faces risk—from new products and technologies to supply chains, operations, markets, and strategic decisions. The challenge is knowing which risks matter most and where to focus your attention. In a Risk Assessment Workshop, we work with your cross-functional team to identify and evaluate the risks associated with your current and future products and services. We assess each risk based on how likely it is to occur and how serious the consequences would be, then prioritize the risks that warrant action. The result is a clear, shared understanding of your most important risks and where mitigation efforts can have the greatest impact. Mitigation planning and facilitation are also available to help turn the assessment into an action plan.
Portfolio Horizon Assessment
Are you investing in the right mix today's business and tomorrow's growth? Companies need innovation across different time horizons. Incremental improvements can strengthen the core business, while more ambitious innovations can create new sources of growth. But the balance matters. Over-investing in incremental innovation can leave a company fighting for share in an established market. Over-investing in disruptive opportunities can put the core business at risk while pursuing uncertain returns. There is no single "right" balance. The appropriate mix depends on your strategy, competitive environment, and tolerance for risk. Using the 3-horizon model, originally developed by McKinsey, we help your team establish a shared view of its risk tolerance and assess the current innovation portfolio against it. We identify where the portfolio may be over- or under-invested and where additional attention could create opportunities for growth. The result is greater alignment around where to invest, how much risk to take, and what the portfolio needs to deliver.
DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING
Design of
Experiments
How can I learn more from fewer experiments—and know that I can trust the results? When developing a product or process, it is tempting to change one variable at a time. It feels safe, but it can take a lot of experiments and can miss important interactions between variables. A well-designed set of experiments can test many variables at once, reveal how they work together, and provide more confidence in the conclusions. This hands-on workshop teaches your team how to design, run, and analyze experiments using factorial and fractional factorial Design of Experiments (DOE). You will learn how to identify the variables that matter, determine how they affect your results, and quantify the uncertainty in what you learn. The result is a more efficient path from “we think this works” to “we have the data to know.” You can also use the results to establish realistic process tolerances and make better development decisions. Available in person or virtually.
Multiple Regression and Hypothesis Testing
What does your data actually tell you—and which factors really matter? Your organization probably has years of data on products, processes, customers, and performance. The challenge is turning all those numbers into useful information. Multiple regression can help uncover which factors are most strongly associated with the outcomes you care about, so you can focus improvement efforts where they are most likely to make a difference. In this hands-on session, we use your organization's real data to demonstrate how regression can reveal relationships that are difficult to see by looking at individual variables. You'll learn how to separate the factors that matter from those that don't—and how to use the results to guide decisions. The session can also include hypothesis testing, a practical way to determine whether an observed difference is likely to be real or simply the result of normal variation. Is your product actually better than a competitor's? Is one marketing approach more effective than another? Are some salespeople generating more profitable results? The result is greater confidence in your decisions—and less reliance on assumptions, anecdotes, or averages that may be misleading.
Unlock Innovation, Minimize Risk: Schedule Your Strategy Session Today!
Whether you're mapping a growth strategy, stress-testing an idea, or sizing up the risk in your way, I'll help you turn it into next steps your team can run with, backed by real data instead of guesswork.